Conversation with My Wife (36)
“Fortune cookie.” You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means.
We like Asian food. Okay, actually, we like American-style Asian food. I’ve never eaten Chinese food in China or Thai food in Thailand, but I’ve eaten Korean food in Seoul, Inchon, Taegu, and Chejudo,* and the Korean restaurants in the States are more like visiting Epcot. (For example, not once did any US waiter offer to cut up my noodles with scissors he kept in his pocket.)
So we have had a series of favorite local Asian restaurants, who have repaid our patronage over the years by going out of business. Our current one has takeout we like, awesome spring rolls, and chef specials that are worth taking a chance on as they rotate by. They also have an unstable supplier of fortune cookies. One order to the next, we never know what we’re going to get. Not in terms of flavor, because who eats fortune cookies for flavor? (We know people who never eat any, they break up the cookies to harvest the fortune and toss the crumbs.) So any random week we get classic fortunes (“You will soon be seeing new lands”), New Age fortunes (“Life is a circle with an empty center”), incoherent fortunes (“By the time finished the start is over”), and companies who understand Yanks will eat anything with a slip of paper in the middle (“Your lucky number is 32876b”). This time we only got one cookie, and split it.
ME: <reading aloud> “‘Each day, compel yourself to do something you would rather not do.’”
DEB: <after checking the paper slip because: #trustissues> “I’m covered. Every morning I get out of bed. Done.”
*Yes, I know they’ve changed the transliterations since I was there in 1988. I’m too lazy right now to look up the modern versions.
(Editor’s note: today, they are romanized as Incheon, Daegu, and Jeju Island)
