Excitement and intrigue follow you closely wherever you go!

I will be traveling to overseas soon. I hope all "excitement and intrigue" are positive and fun kind. No accidents, no lost baggage, wallets, passports, no getting sick. Just fun and good rest.

See, these are the kind of cookies that encourage me to open their shells.

I am about to take an airplane, it tells you what's (not really) gonna happen.

I am looking forward to my trip now!

BTW, no lost items of any kind has resurfaced today. Still waiting for yesterday's fortune to come true.

Something you lost will soon turn up.

Waking up from a violent dream is never easy. I have plenty of those.

This time I was fighting and winning a duel against someone from my work.

Someone I appreciate (professionally) very much. Perhaps the most efficient and diligent person I know at work. Why was I fighting him? How come he was insisting that we continue to fight when I was definitely winning and he was bleeding from wounds?

Dreams are similar to fortune cookies. Many believe that dreams can predict. Personally, I don't see how, considering dreams happen in one's brain. My brain creates dreams (output) strictly based on my daily physical and cognitive activities (input). It's a sophisticated computer, but a computer, nonetheless. It does not just invent. But just as numerical simulations do, perhaps it can combine all sorts of parameters and somehow predict the course of nature, unconsciously??? And just like those financial market simulating algorithms, a brain running on incomplete parameters (and no doubt include irrelevant ones, too) spits out wrong forecast. Then there's no or little point searching for any road sign (for the future) in one's dream. If there's signs, they are most likely to be plain wrong. But these signs are fun to read. Since I am clueless which direction to take in my life and even less at what speed, might as well read these signs, casually, of course.

Let's see, so what happened in my head this morning??? Right before I woke up, I remember sobbing with a still spear in my hand, saying how sorry I was and that we had to stop. I tried to take him to the secretary's office (dunno why). And others were coming back from lunch and they were just walking passed us. What got us into a duel? There, it's all a blur. I conclude, with no logical basis but strictly based on my hunch, that I am not going to kill my colleague. The dream was a product of pure coincidence with random ingredients that my brain chose per chance. If my brain had acted without my consent to simulate my future, well miss, you got it wrong.... this time. But maybe one day, accidentally, you (I am talking to my brain) will pick out the right and close to a full set of relevant parameters to come up with a correct prediction. It's just this little possibility that makes me want to recount my dreams in the morning while 'waking up' because otherwise they are lost forever (I have another blog on weird and fun dreams). And if my future is in it, that'll be a shame.

Today's fortune cookie says: Something you lost will soon turn up.

Oh goooooddd, I may recover some gruesome details of my dream in the middle of the day?

a side note: Of course, dreams may reflect how you were feeling the night before and if you are experiencing stress, etc., but that's just boring and leave that for psychologists to discuss.

Your unlimited patience will be rewarded sooner or later

So it said my fortune cookie yesterday.
I love fortune cookies. Out of those crusty shells, they have spat out incredibly timely and accurate messages time and time again when I found myself at decisive moments in my life.

"He loves you as much as he can. But he cannot love very much." was thrown in my face when I was trying to rebuild a failed relationship with a man (boy) who couldn't stop sleeping with other women.

"You are going to a sunshine city." A very nice heads up, a few days before I received a rejection letter from MIT and I attended a graduate school in Florida.

I am, officially, a physicist. At my job and in my private life with my husband, a research engineer, there is no space for paranormal phenomena. There are no miracles, no magic, nothing incredible happens in nature. If you are surprised, that's because you just don't understand the underlying laws of physics that lead to the events unfolding before you. Intellectual inaptitude should not be covered up by provoking a "higher order" in the universe.

So there's nothing mysterious about fortune cookies, of course. Fortunes found in them are always, almost always, written in a form of suggestive statements. They can be interpreted in many ways. Even blatantly stupid and wrong statements, e.g. "you will become rich tomorrow" or "your mom is a man" can become metaphorically true.... But mostly they give you boring advices, e.g. "be good to your neighbors and they'll be good to you". What's so fortune about this statement anyway? Nothing, really. Or is it?
Well, fortune is in the eyes (or hands) of beholder. If you are desparately searching for fortune, then you are likely to find yours in those little edible aberrant polyhedron. (hey, actually, I don't think I've ever eaten one). For nothing else, fortune cookies can give you a refreshing point-of-view to your current situation. And sometimes, we all just need to step back and get a better view of ourselves.

And now it's about me. I am in a dire need of 'fortune' right now. My career is not -propsering- and I doubt that it ever will if I stay where I am and continue to do what I do. I do not like where I live. My kid's having problems at school. I need a change. A big change. Maybe a multiple number of changes. New ideas, so I can bring the changes I need so desparately.

I open my fortune cookies. But there's a problem. Here in France, Chinese restaurants do not share this custom of giving away fortune cookies. Solution? I resort to fortune cookies on .... internet.

"Your unlimited patience will be rewarded sooner or later."
...........................mmmmKay........................................
Oh, I like this one. It's much much better than the one from last week that said "Flattery will get you far tonight". Yes, I have been patient. And I am going to get rewarded! Hell with 'getting different perspectives and to effectively use them to improve my life'. I want my reward now. I have been good, yes sir, I have. Since I read this 'fortune' I open every email with great enthusiasm, thinking "this message may contain my reward" and close each email with equally great dissapointment.

Silly, I know. But fun, I must admit.

Time to get back to work, as the fortune cookie from two weeks ago said: "The best days are the days you work". And who knows, my reward may come after my death and the cookie will still have told the truth.