When I was a kid, I always looked forward to fortune
cookies -- cracking open the tasty little munchy at the end
of a long meal, finding that tiny slip of paper with a
wonderfully vague fortune that's probably statistically
calculated to happen to close to 85% of the people reading
it. It always made me chuckle and smile, seeing what
things the fortune cookie thought would suddenly be thrust
into my destiny.
But somewhere along the way, fortune cookies stopped
telling fortunes. In today's day and age, breaking open
that hard-pressed mix of sugar and flour has begun to
reveal some very startling messages; things like: "You are
a very kind and generous person." What in the world is
this? An observation cookie? Is that a joke?
The first time I cracked open a fortune cookie and was hit
with such a randomly mediocre depiction of my personality,
I was convinced that something had definitely gone
desperately wrong with the printing, that the lines of
communication had somewhere gotten crossed, and a mixed up
message had been inserted instead. And so, I proceeded with
special interest into the study of the fortune cookie, and
found in despair, that what had begun as a fluke would soon
become the standard for all the messages to come.
From my semi-professional study into the world of fortune
cookies, it seems that within the last decade, fortune
cookies have branched out into four distinct categories.
The four new kinds of cookies are generally this: The
Observation Cookie, The Advice Cookie, The General Wisdom
Cookie, and if you're really lucky, you'll still get the
genuine old-fashioned Fortune Cookie.
Advice cookies are always interesting. Things like: "You
should go into business with a friend." Thanks fortune
cookie, that's great advice! I have one for you:
"Advice from tiny, random slips of paper is usually pretty
terrible. I probably really should NEVER go into business
with a close friend. I, he, or we could both be terrible
businessmen and could very easily ruin our friendship.
Better yet, through our horrendously awful business plan,
our lives could find themselves so completely undone that
we inevitably end up as a brief story on the evening news
with the headline: Business Endeavor Leads to
Murder/Suicide.'"
Try fitting all that inside a cookie! Hmmm, I bet it's
possible. We could call em Manuscript Cookies and they
could each come with a plastic magnifying glass. Hey,
that's not a bad idea. Maybe someone out there wants to go
into business and market the idea with me. Just kidding.
But of all the newer types of cookies to hit the market,
I've got to say that the General Wisdom Cookie is probably
my favorite. If I'm going to be forced to stomach a classic
one-lined cliche, I'll take it while sitting at a fine
restaurant munching a sugary morsel and not from the bumper
of some schmo that just cut me off, thank you very much!
The first time I stumbled upon one of these wayward
cliches, I was so shocked that I saved it and put it in my
wallet. It's still there to this day, waiting for its
chance to once more whisper to me that "Words should be
weighed, not counted."
Hey, that just gave me another brilliant business idea. We
could introduce a Word Weigher into Microsoft Word. There's
already a word counter, and after all, the fortune cookie
clearly wrote that words should be weighed instead of
counted. The word weigher could be that cold slap of
realism that so much of us in the writing world need --
that stern, unrelenting critic unafraid to give us the hard
truth that all our "supposed" snappy whiticisms are really
just chaff borne on the wind. I think we might be on to
something here :)
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Ben Mester is an Author/Online Marketing Professional for
Plan B Publishing, http://planb-publishing.com . He also
does article marketing for Hubpages.
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