Change Your Fortune Cookies

I go through fortune cookies like some people go through lottery tickets. I toss the losers while the good ones end up on my fridge, which is plastered with the little white strips. Two of my favorite fortunes are Something wonderful is about to happen to you and Your dearest wish will come true. The disaster du jour doesn’t really matter to me, because I know they’ll come true. Even though my last fortune was totally incomprehensible, that’s OK. The next one will be THE ONE. I just know it. I’m a believer.

A few years ago I decided to throw a Chinese New Year’s party. I figured what better excuse for the telling of fortunes? There was Chinese food and palm reading. (I know. Palm reading is so not Chinese. But I figured it was in keeping with the notion of ushering in good fortune…or at least catching a glimpse of it.) As a parting party favor, I gave everyone a scratch-off lottery ticket and a fortune cookie from the tacky Chinese-Thai-Vietnamese-Korean-American joint near my house.

Of course, instead of taking their cookies home, the partygoers eagerly snapped them open and began reading their fortunes aloud. Lots of laughter over the pretty meaningless and confusing words typed in tiny font ensued. Those fortunes made people giddy.

I wish I could say as much for the cookies. They were, as expected, stale and insipid and fakely sweet. That’s when I decided to create a fortune cookie that people would want to eat, with fortunes that were just as much fun, still slightly nonsensical, but a lot less esoteric. And because chocolate makes everything better, the cookies had to be dipped in bittersweet.

And so Change Your Fortune Cookies came to be. Ironically, it turns out creating the cookies was the easy part. It was the fortunes that required quite a lot of thought. We’ve all been knocked around by life, I know. But I believe we create our own fortunes. Science supports this. People who think happy thoughts tend to be happier people. I call it the Pollyanna Principle. Don’t buy it? Take a taste of these cookies. Your attitude just might change—and not only because the chocolate’s phenyl ethylamine, a brain chemical that plays no small role in orgasmic pleasure, is doing its job. (Now you understand why Casanova reportedly consumed hot chocolate prior to each of his trysts.)

Who knows? Your fortune may change, too, depending on what you choose to scribble on those slips of paper. In case you find yourself overwhelmed by possibilities of positivity, here are some of the fortunes I’ve created for myself and my friends.

No one can walk backward into the future.

You’re blue. Boohoo. Get over it.

Your body is your temple. Provide offerings of dark chocolate and wine to the mouth altar.

Create a saucy, confident alter ego. Let her do the talking.

Dance with wild abandon. Daily.–Jeanne Ambrose