By Maura Stanton

6 a.m. It’s cold and raining and you don’t want to get out of bed. It’s one of
those days when you’d like to stay home from work, curled up somewhere
comfortable and nice with your knees against your chest. Why not inside a for-
tune cookie? And at once you imagine yourself inside the sweet crispy shell, the
paper fortune wrapped around your body like a sheet. You’re about to close
your eyes and go back to sleep when you start to worry about the fortune. Is
this one of those really good fortunes like the one you’ve kept in your wallet
for years, You will never need to worry about a steady income? Or is it more
sinister like the one you pulled out last month, Idleness is the holiday of fools?
You want to read your fortune but you’ve got to break out of the cookie shell.
Only you can’t. You’re paralyzed. This is someone else’s fortune cookie, and you’ve got to wait patiently until they pour the tea, and crack it open. Then
they’ll laugh and read your fortune out loud for everyone to hear, Your prob-
lem lies not in a lack of ability but in a lack of ambition.

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