Two Unrelated Stories

Story 1

A few weeks ago, I was a little hungry late in the afternoon at work. I wasn’t hungry enough to even eat a granola bar, but definitely needed something to nibble on. While wandering through the mini-kitchen, I spotted a single fortune cookie sitting on the counter, left over from lunch a day or two before.

It was the perfect snack. I unwrapped it as I was walking to my desk and thought about the story my sister once told me about fortune cookies. If you grab the two halves and snap it along the major fold, the fortune won’t come true. Open it any other way, however, and your future presumably will be set in stone. Well, seeing as most fortunes nowadays aren’t even fortunes (how does “Jealously is a useless emotion” predict anything about my future?), I now snap my fortune cookies in half. I did so, popped half in my mouth, and happily chomped away. I set aside the other half for later as I had by that point gotten back to my desk and was back to coding.

A minute or two later, I reached for the other half of the fortune cookie. Before putting it in my mouth, however, I noticed a corner of a piece of paper in it. Remembering the “fortune” part of the cookie, I tried to pull it out.

And all I found in there was that corner of the fortune.

I spent the next few minutes wondering whether I actually had a papery feeling in my throat or was just imagining things.

Story 2

Over this past weekend, the weather warmed up tremendously, and I swapped out my pants for shorts in honor of the spring. Although shorts are fine during the day, I wondered whether they would be appropriate for my bike ride to work. I leave relatively early: the sun is up, though it’s usually still cloudy, and pretty chilly in any case. Seeing as I was already wearing shorts, however, I determined that I would retire my jeans and velcro pants clip in positive thinking for a warm spring.

My ride in on Monday morning was nice. My legs didn’t feel cold, and my fleece kept my core just warm enough. It was colder than it was last summer, when I could get away without even a jacket, but I didn’t mind it at all. Having bike through wind, rain, and temperatures cold enough to see my breath, this was no problem. My bike ride went smoothly, and I arrived at work without a sniffly nose and on schedule. As usual, I put all of my non-working supplies into my helmet on the shelf to retrieve at the end of the day, then brought my backpack to my desk for a day of work.

Monday came and went, and at the end of the day, I went to my helmet to get ready to go. I stuffed my gloves in my backpack since I wouldn’t need them, then put my backpack on. I then noticed my velcro pants clip in my helmet, which I clearly didn’t use while wearing shorts on my bike ride in. Thinking back, I often leave my pants clip in my helmet at home for storage. Now, I only wish that my helmet didn’t give me such bad helmet hair so I could have observed a different indentation in the shape of my hair that day.