Give Me a Quarter, I'll Tell You Your Fortune!

I’m not wild about Chinese restaurants that have the word “buffet” anywhere in the neon title. Nor am I a fan of Chinese food that you can order by number and have delivered straight to your door at midnight. I think it partly goes back to being a kid and ending up in the restaurant bathroom anytime we ate Asian cuisine (thanks, Irritable Bowel Syndrome!).

MSG be damned though, because I still eat the stuff. I can chow down on most Asian foods now (I go crazy for pan fried dumplings), and I’m even able to stomach the crappy Americanized buffet versions—if only because I love my boyfriend and he needs his General Tso’s Chicken fix every few weeks.

But I’m not gonna lie—I do it for the fortune cookie, that cardboard and sugar buttcrack of a cookie that contains the cryptic and curious answers to life’s big mysteries (and some lucky numbers and language lessons, if you’re really lucky).

I had some egg drop soup and chicken fried rice the other night. The food was meh, but I got a good fortune and I’m sharing:

“Success is never final and failure never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

Perhaps this is a good omen for my never-ending job hunt? And maybe for all of the other people out there who can’t find work while our economy slips further and further into the vat of Chinese buffet chocolate pudding.

Remember Wall Street, giant vats of pudding are kind of like quicksand: the more you struggle to get out of the mess, the further you slip.

Hey! Now that I think of it, that sounds like a pretty good fortune.