Monthly Archives: January 2014

Bill, I had a space dream, and you were in it

Dear Bill Simmons:

I had this dream last week where NASA offered you the chance to hop on a rocket ship and captain a deep space mission. “Bill,” they said, “We want you to spread sports across the cosmos. Get out there, find some alien life, and teach them all about basketball and football and hockey. Show them about sportsmanship and being a team player and the importance of picking a good mascot to represent their species. If there’s anybody that can not only show the aliens what Earth sports are all about, but can also get them actually interested, it’s you.”

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And you were like, “I’ll do it.” And everyone smiled, but you continued, “On one condition. I pick the crew.” And they were a little skeptical, I mean, what do you really know about staffing a spaceship? But eventually they realized that it was the only way they’d get you on board, and so they agreed, “All right Bill, we hope you know what you’re doing.”

You did know what you were doing. You picked me to join you as your first officer. I was sitting here on my computer, dicking around, killing some time before I had to go to work, when I got this call on my cell phone from an unknown number. It was you.

“Hey Rob, Bill Simmons here. I’ve been reading your letters to me every week on your web site asking me for a job. Well, here it is, your lucky day!” And at first I was really excited, like, yes, finally, I’m going to get to work at Grantland, me, a full-time writer at one of the best sports and pop culture web sites on the Internet. My imagination went crazy, I started picturing what kind of posters I’d use to decorate my office, or how I’d casually drop by your office around three-thirty to ask if you wanted anything while I went out to Starbucks.

It was a shock when you told me it wasn’t exactly the offer that I’d been dreaming about, but of course I still accepted without hesitation. Because seriously Bill, I’d do anything to work with you. I’d leave all of my family and friends here on Earth as we set out on a one-way trip to explore the galaxy. That’s the kind of dedication I’d bring to your team, in both my fantasy dream world and in real life.

Yeah, the dream kind of went in a weird direction after I said yes to the mission. Like most dreams go, there were huge gaps in the narrative, weird tangential events that didn’t really make much sense in terms of context or continuity. For example, all of the sudden we were both deep in space, and you told me that the months of isolation were starting to get to you, that routine spaceship maintenance work wasn’t as satisfying as you thought it might be.

But I was like, “Bill, why didn’t you say something earlier? I brought a chess set. We could learn to play, together.” And yeah, you lit up at the idea of a new hobby, something to really challenge your atrophying mental faculties. But we discovered pretty quickly that playing chess in zero-g isn’t really possible pastime. Maybe if I had thought it out a little better, like if I brought some Velcro, something to keep the pieces from flying off the board. But no, I didn’t have anything, and so we both gave up after a few minutes of futilely trying just to keep everything still on the constantly floating surface.

And then pretty soon after that, we weren’t in space anymore, we were at a McDonald’s. It didn’t make sense at all, but neither of us questioned our new surroundings. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, you didn’t even remember being in space at all. And when I was like, “Bill, don’t you remember? The spaceship? The chess set?” you were like, “My name’s not Bill, it’s Fred. And can you hurry up a little with my order?”

It was then that I looked down, and I was actually behind the counter, I was wearing a McDonald’s uniform, and my name tag didn’t say “Rob,” it said, “Jean.” Which, yeah, that doesn’t really make much sense. The rest of the dream went on for like another minute or so, in dream minutes anyway, who knows how long it was in real life. Everything got fuzzier and fuzzier until I woke up, it was ten-thirty, I was late for work. But I still thought, I’ve got to write this down. I’ve got to tell Bill.

And now that I’ve written it all out, I’m actually kind of sorry, because for real, I know how boring dream stories are. Whenever anybody starts telling me, “Rob, listen to this dream I had …” I automatically shut down, because regardless of how interesting the dream may have been in the dream, it’s never even remotely worth retelling once you wake up. And so I don’t know why I thought this one was going to be different, because it wasn’t, and again, I apologize.

All I can say is, when you hire me to work at Grantland, I’ll never talk about my dreams. Unless you order me to. Then I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you say. That’s the kind of employee I am. Unless you order me to stop following your orders, because I’m not that clever, I won’t really know how to respond to one of those logical paradoxes.

Anyway, I hope you have a great weekend. And I hope that whichever team you predicted to win the Super Bowl wins. And I’ll tell everybody, “See? It’s just like Bill Simmons said would happen. That guy is the best.” Me? I predicted the Giants would win, way back when they were 0 – 6. Things were looking pretty good for a while, until Dallas scored that field goal. I hate the Cowboys.

Your friend,

Rob G.

California burger, medium

I was having lunch with one of my friends at a nearby diner here in Queens. Although I probably eat here once a week at the minimum, it’s not like I’m all that familiar with this particular menu. But I’ve grown up eating at diners, I worked at a diner all throughout high school and college, and so I’m super familiar with the New York diner menu in general. Sure, if you look closely enough, the brushstrokes might go in the occasionally different direction, but if you’re just browsing from a casual distance, it’s almost exactly the same anywhere you go.

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“What are you getting?” my friend asked.

“The California burger,” I told him without even looking at the menu. I go to a diner, I don’t want to look at the menu. All it’s going to do is signal to the waitress that I don’t know what I’m doing, like I need a few minutes or something. I don’t need a few minutes.

“That sounds pretty good,” my friend said, “I think I’m going to get that too.”

The waitress came over, “Hey guys. Can I start you off with anything to drink?”

I don’t need you start me off with anything to drink. I’m ready to give you everything. Don’t worry about my friend still looking at the menu. He’s ready too. I’m not going to ask him, I’m just going to go ahead and let you know that, we’re both ready, we’ll give you the whole thing right now.

“I think we’re ready,” I told the waitress, “I’ll take the California burger, deluxe, I’ll have  it medium, waffle fries, and can I get a Coke? Please? Thank you.”

“And for you?” She asked my friend.

“I’ll also have the California burger. Medium-rare …”

Big mistake. I’m not going to say anything, of course, I don’t want to come across as being too pushy, especially since I may have rushed the ordering process a little bit. But, and I get it here, I really do, usually medium-rare is the way to go. You’re eating at a steak place, medium-rare definitely. A specialty burger restaurant? Again, anything about medium-rare and you’re just wasting your money.

But at a diner, or diners in the tri-state area anyway, medium’s always your best bet. Chances are the burgers are frozen, which, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I actually like the taste of frozen beef patties, but I’d prefer to give the whole thing at least a little bit of time to come down in temperature.

Plus, and this is in no way trying to disrespect the staff, but think about the guy working the grill. Think about all of the other burgers he’s trying to cook at the same time. Everybody that goes to a diner, everybody orders medium. So he’s got a whole section of his grill dedicated to cooking medium burgers. He’s got it down to a science. But then a new ticket comes in the window. “Order in!” the waitress calls out, and instead of the standard “M” circled next to the order, it’s “MR.” The grill guy thinks, OK, I got this. Medium-rare. And he tries, he really tries. But he’s trying a little too hard. He’s out of his element.

Just … just trust me. You go to a diner, you order a burger medium. Anything under, you’re going to want to save a little bite to send out to a lab once you start getting sick later that day. Anything above, well, I hope you like eating hockey pucks.

“You want that deluxe?” the waitress was still here, it was apparent that my friend didn’t have this down to the science that I did.

“Yeah … regular fries please.”

Regular fries. Man, who goes to a diner and gets regular fries? There’s a reason that they charge you fifty cents extra for waffle fries. Because they’re fifty cents more delicious. Seriously, regular fries are just that, regular. They look like they’ll be pretty tasty, but once you take that first bite, it’s obvious that these things aren’t even a tenth as good as their identical looking cousins from McDonald’s. No, for whatever reason, despite all of the things diners do right, diner fries are never up to par. They’re not salty enough, they’re dry in the middle, you need at least a bottle and a half of ketchup to get through one order.

You’ve got to go with the waffle fries. Or onion rings. But onion rings are a distant second place. Waffle fries are what diners do right. You don’t even need ketchup. I mean, if you wanted to lightly coat the end of one waffle fry just to capture a little essence of tomato, go ahead, that couldn’t hurt. But it’s unnecessary. Diner waffle fries are fantastic, a treat in and of themselves. And for only fifty cents? Please, I’d gladly pay two, two-fifty extra for waffle fries.

“Here you go boys, enjoy,” the waitress said as she placed the burgers on the table. “I’ll be right back with another Coke for you,” she nailed it, I didn’t even have to ask.

For whatever reason, diner burgers are always served open face, and so it took me fifteen seconds or so to balance all of the toppings on top of the meat and close everything shut. I picked the whole thing up in my hands, studied from which angle I’d attack my lunch, and took a first bite. It was perfect. Juicy. Delicious. I wasn’t really surprised, that’s what I love most about diners, the consistency, their almost inability to screw up a burger and fries. But while I was lost in the flavor of meat and bread, my friend interrupted my feeding.

“Wasn’t there supposed to be avocado? Cheese?” he hadn’t even touched his food yet. He was kind of just looking around it, peering under the toppings, giving my burger sideways glances, trying to see if our meals were identical.

“Oh yeah,” I told him, “You’re thinking of a restaurant California burger. This is a diner California burger: lettuce, tomato, raw onion, and mayo.”

It didn’t even occur to me that he wouldn’t have known the difference, and yeah, when I heard him fumble with the medium-rare and the regular fries, I guess I should’ve known to give him a little heads up about what exactly constitutes a diner California burger. Because yes, he was right, kind of. If you to a restaurant, especially one of these cool artisanal craft burger spots, a California burger most always comes with avocado, some sort of jack cheese, a specialty sauce, like an aioli or a sriracha infused mayo. Yeah, now that I was really thinking about it, that’s what it’s like at the restaurant where I work, it’s the California burger, it’s topped with organic arugula or something like that.

But diner burgers are different than restaurant burgers. I’m not saying that it’s better or worse, but there’s a parallel menu system that defines what you’re going to get when you order at a diner. And this is especially true regarding the burger section. I don’t know how it happened or from where it originated, but all diners have pretty much the same exact burger section. Even though these operations are individually owned and managed, it’s like they must have had their menus inspired from the same source.

Like a Texan burger. Without being as familiar as I am with the diner menu, what sort of toppings and sauces come to your mind just from hearing the words Texan burger? Maybe some tangy barbeque sauce? Nope, that’s the barbeque burger. Smoked cheese? No, that’s a Vermont burger. Or maybe it’s topped with chili? Chili burger. Spicy peppers? Mexican burger.

A Texan burger is a regular burger with a fried egg on top. That’s it. Welcome to Texas. Yee-haw. Or the London burger, served on an English muffin with a slice of raw onion. I don’t really know any British people, but this is exactly how I imagine them to eat their hamburgers. My favorite is the Twin burger. No, it’s not a double burger, that is, one burger made with two patties, but it’s two individual hamburgers served on one plate. Why order two burgers when you can just order one twin burger? It’s genius.

Maybe none of this makes any sense, maybe you haven’t been to too many New York diners. But like I said, I’m intimately familiar with the thick-as-a-phonebook diner menu, I have a deep understanding of that whole page of burgers, there’s got to be at least fifty choices. And yeah, I don’t have an explanation as to what exactly is so California about a regular burger with lettuce, tomato, onions and mayo, but that’s what it is, that’s the California burger. If you wanted something with avocado and cheese, you probably should have ordered a Santa Fe burger without the sautéed peppers and onions.

As soon as I took my last bite, a busboy materialized out of thin air to take my plate away. The waitress was right behind with check in hand, “Anything else today?” as she dropped it on the table, not a question, a formality really, a nice way of saying, “Thank you, please leave.”

I looked at my friend’s plate. He was done, like he stopped eating, but there were a bunch of toppings that had spilled out of his burger, globs of mayo next to his half-eaten portion of regular French fries.

“That was great!” I said with a big smile to my friend as I counted out my money for the bill. Even though it was noticeable that he was a little underwhelmed with the whole diner experience, I wanted my enthusiasm to shine through, maybe he’d see it, how happy I was, that I wasn’t faking it, that I really love the diner, and maybe he wouldn’t give up hope that next time things might go better for him, that maybe he’d figure out how to order correctly.

Because that enthusiasm, the huge smile of satisfaction, it wasn’t forced, I wouldn’t have been able to stop smiling if I wanted to. Because I love diners. I could eat at a diner for every meal, every day, for the rest of my life. When I’m an old man someday and I retire, that’s all I want to do, sit in a booth, drink coffee, and order all my diner favorites. It’s like that’s where I feel most comfortable in life, at a diner. There’s seriously nothing better.

My biggest regret

It’s my biggest regret. And I can’t stop thinking about it. If only I hadn’t listened to my wife. Why can’t I put it behind me? That pit in the center of my stomach, the metallic taste stuck to the back of my tongue. Why did I second-guess myself? Why didn’t I follow my instincts? If only I’d ordered that second burrito, I wouldn’t be going through what I’m going through now. I wouldn’t be so hungry.

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And after all of this time together, you’d think the one thing I’d be handle in our relationship is ordering food. Yet it’s always a negotiation, regardless of how hungry I say that I am, despite my insistence that I’ll be able to make room for a second entrée, it’s always this sideways glance, the, “Are you sure?”

Am I sure? I don’t know. For a minute, just a brief moment, I’m caught off guard. Maybe I’m not as hungry as I think I am. There’s a quick flashback in my head, I’m little kid again, it’s Thanksgiving and I’ve overloaded my plate with too much food to possible consume in one sitting. My grandmother scolds me for such waste, telling me that my eyes are bigger than my stomach.

Could that be the case here? No. It’s not. I rallied. I fought back. I told my wife, listen, I’ll get the chimichangas, you get flautas, and then I’m getting a burrito also, because I can handle it, because I’m starving. And yes, people use that word a little too casually, no, I wasn’t literally starving. But figuratively, my stomach was distending outward due to the lack of nourishment inside my digestive system.

“Rob,” and this is where I was at a distinct disadvantage, because where my defense, my insistence on two meals had to make a comeback, my wife stood resolute from the beginning, “Why don’t you just eat your chimichangas, and then you can finish whatever I don’t eat from my plate?”

And yeah, I guess that’s a good point. But this was one of those rare occasions where even that might not have been enough. Even if it was, it’s not like I’d be getting a full serving of flautas, there’d be maybe half a flauta left, and of course practically the entire portion of my wife’s rice and beans. Don’t get me wrong, I love rice and beans. But I need equal amounts entrée to side dish here, I don’t want just bite after bite of rice and beans.

Ideally, if I were out by myself, table for one please, I would’ve gone for both entrees without looking back. So that was the loudest voice screaming in my head, get the burrito, nobody tells you not to order the burrito, nobody tells you anything. Yeah, here it was, my third wind, I was just going to ignore everything until the waitress came over and I’d blurt it out, chimichangas and the burrito please, and then I’d cover my ears and close my eyes and not respond to any external stimuli until the food hit the table.

But I didn’t get the chance. My wife was still looking at me. I was on my third wind, yeah, it was strong, but she was still riding that first wind, she hadn’t budged at all. “Rob,” she said again, and I wanted to cover my ears right there, but she had me, “Just get the chimchangas, and I’m not going to eat all of mine. You don’t need another whole burrito. Flautas are like mini burritos anyway. You’ll be fine.”

And beside the fact that flautas are nothing at all like mini burritos, despite that voice, something inside of me warning that I wouldn’t be fine, that this nagging sense of being way too hungry was going to follow me out of the restaurant, accompany me to bed, for some reason I gave in. I waited for a super strong fourth wind to blow in and provide some irrefutable attack, but there was nothing, the waitress came over to the table.

“Can I start you guys off with anything?” I looked to my wife, “Guacamole?” I mouthed to her? And she didn’t have to open her mouth, her head was almost imperceptibly moving from side to side, she communicated with her eyes, “Rob, we already have chips on the table.”

The food came, I housed my chimichangas, I polished off all of the chips and salsa, and I waited for my wife to finish her food so we could trade plates. It was just as I had suspected. There was maybe three-quarters of a flauta left, along with basically the entire portion of rice and beans, and of course that little garnish of shredded iceberg lettuce.

What really killed me was, my wife got to hang onto my plate in front of her, like a trophy she hadn’t really earned. This thing was spotless. Talk about the clean plate club, I was practically club president that night. Everything was gone, rice, beans, garnishes, I could just imagine the dishwasher looking at this plate and wondering, who did such a great job? I’d better show the cook. And he would, he’d show the cook, they’d all be overwhelmed with a sense of pride, wow, this guy really loved our chimichangas, really appreciated our authentic cuisine.

And now all of that work was credited to my wife. Meanwhile, I had this plate of basically scraps in front of me. Like I said before, I want each bite of a meal to be in a proportion, a little bit of entrée, some rice, a few beans, maybe a sliver of lettuce. That’s how you polish a plate clean. You can’t just eat plain rice. I mean, you can, but it’s not fun. That’s not why you go out to a restaurant.

And so there were a few leftovers on the plate when the busboy came to clear the table. He automatically took my clean plate away from my wife, but he paused to me, “You finished?” I wanted to be like, you don’t understand, that wasn’t my plate, that was my wife’s. I ate a lot. I ate mine and then most of hers. Seriously.

But he didn’t care. And worst of all, I was totally still hungry. It wasn’t right away, but pretty soon after we got home, I realized that I actually wanted that burrito still. Why didn’t I trust myself? Who knows my appetite better than me? Nobody. From now on, I’m never listening to anybody at a restaurant ever again. Because man, that burrito, the one that got away. It would have been the crown jewel to a perfect meal. But now I’ll never know the satisfaction that would have come from having gone from super hungry to ultimately satiated. It’s my biggest regret. I should have ordered that burrito.

When I was a little kid, I used to love to close my eyes and press the palms of my hands to my eyelids

When I was a little kid, I used to love to close my eyes and press the palms of my hands to my eyelids. I found that if I kept applying pressure, I’d see all of these colors and patterns. They’d emerge slowly at first, but after a few seconds it would be like wave after wave of interesting shapes and designs. Of course, just as things got cool, my eyes would start to hurt, the pressure of my hands on my eyeballs would build until I’d have to let go, so I’d wait a few seconds and start all over again.

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I just tried doing it right now, but it’s not nearly as fun as I remember it being when I was much younger. It began similarly enough, I leaned my elbows on my desk and pressed my face into the bottom part of my palms. The darkness of my closed eyes gave way to a deep yellow, glowing slightly, with a round circle of black in the middle.

After a second or so, the yellow started breaking up into rectangles. I couldn’t really focus on any single rectangle in particular, but if I didn’t try too hard, if I stared straight ahead, I could see the various lines and ninety degree angles constantly shifting, almost like a living plaid on the inside of my head.

But then it kind of fizzled out, back to the regular black that I see when I shut my eyes and go to bed at night, a few red squiggles in the periphery of my vision. When I was a kid, I remember it used to be so much more vivid, it would almost look like a fireworks show, coming at me, like moving toward my face.

I didn’t want to give up, so I increased the pressure on my face, it started to hurt, but I wanted to see something else. And yeah, the colors picked up a little bit. This time it was royal blue lighting strikes spreading from the center outwards. This was cool, it was like they were moving. But it was still that same dark background. I couldn’t replicate the neon reds and greens that I remember being able to get to if I could only hang on a little longer.

But I couldn’t. The pain was starting to spread past the back on my eye sockets, I imagined all of this irreparable harm that I was causing to my eyes. What if I cut out the circulation for too long? What if I did some serious damage? What would I tell the ophthalmologist?

OK, I just tried it one last time, I really didn’t want to give up on making my eyes do for me what they once did for me when I was much younger. I really pressed down hard this time, right away, and I saw the plaid, I got to the blue lighting, and then, yeah, I guess I did get to the next level. Everything turned a sort of beige, almost like a really whitened mud color. It looked like it was pixelated, even though it was mostly solid, but I stared at it for the few seconds that it revealed itself to me. I thought, OK, I’m definitely seeing a color, and there’s clearly a texture that I’m making out.

Was this real? I mean, I know it’s not real, real. But am I really seeing something? Or is this just me imagining what should be there? I held it for way too long, and when I finally let go of my eyes, the blood rushed back all at once, it was almost like I could feel it charge toward the eye and bounce off the lining of my eyelid. And yeah, that hurt. Now I couldn’t really focus my eyes. And there’s this weird shape in the center of my vision, almost like a pineapple ring, and it’s sort of making whatever I’m directly looking at look a little discolored.

It’s like, you know when you’re looking out a window, and you can see those little translucent stringy things right outside the center of your vision? They’re almost floating in there, like I’m imagining whatever is in my eye to be a fishbowl full of these things. When I move my eyes from side to side, they move too, they’re three dimensional. If I circle my eyes around, they’ll respond accordingly, almost like I’m shaking up a snow globe.

But I can never get them to fall right in the center. I’ll try to get one to fall just so, so I inspect these things floating around I know that they’re there, I know that the colors are there when I put pressure on my eyes, but I can never get a close look. So much of what I’m describing has to be clouded by imagination, right?

I think about my grandfather, how he suffered from macular degeneration during the last ten or so years of his life. I’ve read about that disease, it’s always described as a sort of blind spot that develops from the center of the vision outward. So by the end, it’s like you only have peripheral vision. How terrible that has to be, everywhere you look, the whole world is just a little further to the left or the right, and you have to make your eyes stop chasing the visible. Like if you want to watch TV, I guess you’ve got to cock your head at a forty-five degree angle, you’ve got to stare at the wall and hope that those little jelly things in your head might stop moving so you can just chill out and watch some Jeopardy uninterrupted.

Don’t dismiss the power of the fortune cookie

Some of the best advice I’ve ever received has come from the wisdom found inside fortune cookies. Yes, those delicious sugar wafers have come to my rescue on innumerable occasions. It’s often something that I take for granted, finishing up a delicious Chinese takeout dinner, discovering those three or four individually wrapped cookies thrown in between the double-layered paper and plastic bag combination used to deliver my food.

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“Why’d they give us five cookies when we only ordered two dinners?” I gave up on even asking, because some things I’m probably just not meant to understand. Like just how do they get those little slips of paper inside the cookies? Are they baked with the fortunes already pressed inside the layers of cookie dough? Or do the bakers have to try and slip the message inside once they’re out of the oven?

And why am I so skeptical? Why, after having had so much secret knowledge revealed to me through the power of the fortune cookie, do I still look upon these treats as mere trinkets? It’s like I can’t get past my reservations, I’m always telling myself, it’s just a little trick, an ancient Chinese gimmick used to boost Chinese food sales.

But it’s not a gimmick. Like one time I opened up a fortune cookie, and it read: “If you are afraid to shake the dice, you will never roll a six.” Ha, I thought as I munched on those lightly sweetened wafers, that’s cute.

Only, later that night, I was playing Settlers of Catan with my brother and a couple of his friends. For the majority of the game, I sat mostly on the sidelines. I don’t know if it was poor settlement placement or just bad luck, but I wound up limping through the session barely even accumulating enough resources to buy a development card.

But late in the game I experienced something of a comeback. “Six,” the player to my left announced after rolling the dice. That was big for me. That was like two sheep. “Six,” again, the next roll was the same, two more sheep. Pretty soon I was knee deep in sheep cards. I had enough to trade for wheat, for ore, I was building cities. Before long, I was back in the game, I had a realistic chance of overcoming my opponents and capturing ten victory points to secure the win.

The dice were in my hands. All I needed was another six and that would be it, game over. But I was so nervous, my hands were sweating, I was worried about rolling the dice. And that’s when the fortune from the fortune cookie popped into my head. It was like I could read it, the visualization was so real: “If you are afraid to shake the dice, you will never roll a six.”

I closed my eyes and told myself, you are not afraid to roll these dice. I said it out loud. Everybody was like, “Rob, what are you talking about?” but I put them out of my head also. With a loose fist on the dice, I tossed them once, twice, and there was the release. Boom, boom, the dice hit the table.

Six. It worked. And then another six. It actually worked too well. Because when you’re playing Settlers, you’re rolling two dice, or die, I always forget which one is plural and singular. But it doesn’t matter. Twelve. No good.

I wound up losing. But not before learning a very valuable lesson: never underestimate the power of the fortune cookie. Maybe I should have examined my fortune a little closer, because what I really needed with those dice wasn’t a six, but a three and a three. Or a two and a four. You know, six total, not six and six.

I thought, you know what? That would be a great fortune cookie fortune: “Never underestimate the power of the fortune cookie.” I went to the Chinese food place and asked them where they bought their fortune cookies from. My search led me to a wholesale distributor in Paramus, NJ. They in turn gave me an address to somewhere in, you guessed it, China.

Let’s just say that negotiations are still ongoing. The people in charge of the factory are reluctant to put me on as a specialist. Even though I feel like I could really breathe some new life into the fortune cookie business. Like, why don’t you ever see fortune cookies outside of Chinese restaurants? Maybe you just need the right marketing and fortune cookies could be something you’d find in the snack aisle, a treat to be enjoyed independently of chow mein or beef and broccoli.

Anyway, heed my advice. The next time you get a fortune cookie, pay attention. There’s a lot to be learned. Plus, these winning numbers have to work eventually. Also, I learned how to say pants in Chinese: ku zeh. Pretty cool, right?