Alas, I am in a hurry this Friday night to meet deadlines amidst the sudden onslaught of schoolwork that has been piled upon me in the past week.

Since I don’t have time to grab one of the many fortunes I have saved over the years, let us pretend that I opened a fortune cookie today, and—behold! No fortune to be found.

Note: I did in fact have Chinese/Japanese food today, but the fortune in the cookie I was given was lame, so I threw it out. I believe it said something along the lines of “you will have very good fortune this week”. Very thought provoking.

Let me step back in an attempt to make something of nothing:

I have been given something expecting a fortune—something to be told to expect or to make do of.

Often, I find myself going about my typical routines with some sort of expectation with what exactly should be given, what I should receive, and the manner in which these transactions should occur.

Depending on the situations, when these out of the ordinary happenings occur, I am suddenly confused. Usually, these are relatively non-noteworthy happenings, so let me jump to the real point I’m trying to make here.

Big picture situation:

Junior year has hit hard from the get-go, and I am suddenly thrown into the fastest current of my biology major while being hit with the backwinds of my music major, while an attempted philosophy minor foams around and splashes into my eyes, making it hard to see anything. A dark sheet of responsibilities from work, E-board, and other commitments is thundering down, drenching me and trying to push me underwater.

In a realistic world, I will graduate on time and finish everything relatively successfully, just enough so that I can move on to pursue a career in medicine.

But I take this idea for granted. Perhaps, I have been given the fortune cookie with no fortune.

What would I do, should I fail from the lifelong decision that has essentially been decided before birth, that I should go on to medical school and become a doctor?

“Failure is not an option,” I was always pushed to believe. Failure is something I do not want to believe, but say for whatever reasons everything I was working towards fell apart for reasons beyond my control.

The ability to write your own fortune—it seems like an extremely idealistic plan that an adult might urge you to do when things didn’t go exactly as you had hoped.

However, I don’t think that this would still be fortune. It would be something that you were pushing to do, and struggling to achieve. It might be success, but it wouldn’t make sense to me to call it fortune.

Perhaps, our fortune refers not to what we are trying to do and succeed in, but rather our multitude of failures—simply the things that are or were, rather than the things you worked to change. After all, calling your fortune the “blemishes” of your life would only be another way to define it. It wouldn’t necessarily make it an entirely different thing.