Just Thinking: Unfortunately, some cookie fortunes beyond imagination
Is it me, or have fortune cookie fortunes become cryptically inscrutable?
It’s me, I suppose. It’s not as if I hadn’t noticed that other once-comprehensible encounters with the 21st century were now leaving me baffled.
Television commercials, for instance. My husband and I watch only a couple of programs with any regularity, and the commercials attached to them, once simple, heart-warming stories about better laundry soap or how to buy insurance, are now 30 seconds of experimental absurdism.
At least, that’s how*we* see them. To another audience, these ads might be as straightforward as Mikey eating Life cereal. No one could fail to understand the plot, the point or the intended audience of the Mikey commercials.
Today’s commercials have no Mikeys. They have graphics, music and dialogue that seems disconnected from clever if disconnected dialogue and storylines, if that’s what they are, that leave my husband and me flummoxed.
“What *was* that?” one of us will say. “Was that trying to sell something? Were we supposed to understand it?”
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No doubt we aren’t supposed to understand it. We’re supposed to ignore it, let it wash over us without even trying to get wet. I half expect the voiceover guy to say, “Confused? Don’t worry about it. This isn’t for your demographic.”
But if that’s the idea, to air commercials during “Jeopardy!” intended for people not in my demographic, I suggest whoever’s buying that airtime is out of his depth. My demographic is all about Jeopardy.
To my point, though, cryptic commercials might be just one of many baffling life encounters to come: jokes we won’t get, movies we won’t understand, foods that cause us to recoil and fortune cookies that make no sense, even when we read them twice.
Here was my recent fortune, delivered last week in a brown takeout bag: “Feeding a cow with roses does not get extra appreciation.”
Feeding a … what? A cow with … which?
It didn’t help that my copy-editing mind swiftly drew an imaginary “delete” symbol (a line with a squiggle at the end) through “with.” You don’t feed a cow with roses or oats or Popsicles, I thought sternly. You feed a cow roses. Possibly with a spoon.
Also, that verb “get.” It’s wrong, too. It should be “result in,” or maybe “earn a person.” Corrected as indicated, this might be a fortune worth reading. “Feeding a cow roses does not earn a person extra appreciation.” See? But it still doesn’t make any sense.
My husband’s fortune was even more bewildering. It read, “If you want to win anything – a race, yourself, your life – you have to go a little berserk.”
Given the general tenor of today’s news, do we need fortune cookies giving people permission to go bananas? And what does it mean, “if you want to win yourself? Your life?” What are you, a sideshow teddy bear? Or does this fortune mean winning the game of life, as if it’s a contest? I’m genuinely asking; I’m no longer in a demographic that can interpret fortune cookie fortunes without the assistance of younger people.
Who writes cookie fortunes anyway, I wonder? To find out, I did some deep research. I typed “Fortune cookie writers” into a search bar and pressed “enter.”
It turns out that in 2017 a man named James Wong became the cookie fortune writer for Wonton Food. The most important thing about fortune writing, Wong said then, was not to offend people. The second was to write enough fortunes that people don’t get the same fortune twice. I can understand that. Being warned about a cow’s diet once is startling enough; getting the same fortune a few days later might put me off ruminators forever.
But it’s reassuring to know a real person, a person who gives time and thought to his work, is turning out most fortunes. You might assume anyone could dash off a few hundred fortunes each day, but if you tried it, you might write, “May you live long and prosper” and then be out of ideas.
Only a true professional can keep churning out fortunes that make us laugh, cry and wonder if going into securities trading was a mistake. Good for Mr. Wong. May he live long and prosper.
Email Margo Bartlett at margo.bartlett@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: Just Thinking: Unfortunately, some cookie fortunes beyond imagination
