I enjoy looking at the fortune that comes in a fortune cookie when we get Chinese food. They don’t really mean anything, but it’s interesting to see what kind of sentiment you get. I haven’t seen an actual fortune, like a supposed telling of what’s going to happen to you, in a long time. Usually now, you can expect to read something that passes for wisdom, like this one in a recent cookie that my husband opened:

“If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”

It sounds like a set-up for overly high expectations to me. This is the kind of person who keeps sending back their steak at the restaurant because it’s not done perfectly. Eventually the steak will be the best it can be, but nobody wants to eat with you and the restaurant bars you from returning. There’s probably a context in which this saying works, though.

I was far more amused by the fortune in my cookie:

“Failure is the path of lease persistence.”

Yes, apparently if you persist in getting a lease, you are setting yourself up for failure. Ha ha! Someone wasn’t doing their proof-reading job very well that day at the fortune cookie factory.

And on the topic of quotable quotes, I was given some “Literary Tea Bags” for my birthday last year. Each bag of tea has a tag attached with a quote about reading, some of which even are written by people whose names one might recognize, like C.S. Lewis. But most of the quotes sort of seem like someone did a quick Google search and just picked some random ones. One day I got a tea bag out and the quote on the tag said:

“Read books. They are good for us.”

I picture the product manager breathing down someone’s neck to finish this project of collecting quotes, so the beleaguered employee jots down that little jewel and throws it in. It wasn’t attributed to anyone, so the brilliant Mr. Anonymous strikes again! I don’t know about you, but I can think of a whole lot of books that are definitely NOT good for us.

Read this blog. It is good for you.

And now it’s time to sign off so I can read something good for me and then delete this in the morning.