Good Fortune

I am perplexed. I know I have read it right but I’m still not sure what it means. I want to ask a question, but I am not sure to whom. I read it again. It says:

Your present plans are going to succeed if you stick to them.

It’s my fortune from my PF Chang’s cookie. And I am just silly enough to be genuinely excited when I read it, but now I am negotiating terms.

Hmmm. Which plans? I have a lot of plans. Is it my plan to stay out until after the kids are put to bed so my day off will be complete? Or is it the plan to go get a cupcake as soon as this PF Chang’s dinner digests a little? I am virtually certain that both of those plans are going to succeed, and I didn’t need a slip of paper in a mediocre-tasting, painfully-crunchy cookie to tell me that.

Maybe it means that my plan to create one language that the whole world would learn from birth so we could all talk to each other without any misunderstandings will succeed. That plan, made in my bed late one night when I was in Kindergarten, has been sidelined for the past 35 years or so. But technically, it was one of my plans. That’s really good news for me though. I always imagined I would get the Nobel Prize for that one.

This opens a lot of possibilities.

I plan to stay skinny until the day I die. But if I am planning that, does that mean that I shouldn’t go get the cupcake? It doesn’t seem fair to kill one plan’s hope of fruition just to fulfill the other’s. Maybe I’ll just do a little extra time on the bike tomorrow instead so both my pretty plans can skip down the path of success together.

I have a plan to boost my freelance career to the point that I am able to work from home and have a career that interests and fulfills me. So far that plan has been stalling…but the cookie isn’t lying, right? That can’t be part of its moral compass. Cookies don’t even have a moral compass. Or a mouth.

I plan right now to write a blog entry that is pithy, philosophical and entertaining. Is it? One can’t always tell at this point in the process. Maybe after some re writes…

I plan to do a triathlon someday. I figure I am a great swimmer and that tends to be the hardest part for most people.  With that leg virtually licked, I figure the other parts can’t be that bad. I don’t train or even research how to train, but I know a couple of people that do triathlons. Training by proximity if you will. Does that mean that my plan to do a triathlon based on my ability to swim and knowing people who do them is going to succeed? Seems unlikely, but I refer to the aforementioned limitations for a cookie’s attempts at deceit so I wonder. This might have some legs.

My “present plans”…maybe this is the key. I have a couple of presents that I am intending to give to people. It could mean that they are going to like the presents. So that’s a load off. I was really worried that my habit of last minute online options emailed on the actual birthday to the party involved was going to be a problem. Err… I mean my habit of carefully shopping and selecting a gift that is designed for the person it is intended will not be a problem.

At one time I planned to never date and be a scientist and live with my mom and dad forever. Since I did date, got bored in real science class, and live about 1700 miles away from Mom and Dad’s, I think it’s safe to say that one doesn’t count as a “present plan.”

Maybe the key word here is "succeed”. There are varying levels of success. It really just depends on where you put the bar. Is success accomplishing the goal, or kicking the goal’s butt? If I were to say, finish a triathlon before they take down the finish line and the street sweepers come, is that success? Or is it only if I place in my age group?

I can answer that question, though. It would be the fact that I was able to get a sitter often enough so that I could train and even attend the event in the first place that would define success on that plan!

For those of you that know me, maybe the key words here are “if you stick to them”. Ahh. Tenacity. The elusive quality that abandoned me on my pursuit of acting fame. And again in the corporate ladder climb I started years later. Or has stymied me in my attempt to write a romance story in 12,000 words.  But even before these aborted efforts, this is the attribute that deserted me when I planned to learn sign language from a book.

But now that I know it will succeed as long as I stick to it, can I make new plans? I have a couple that I have been sitting on for a while. I could get to work on my car that runs on trash like the one at the end of Back To The Future. Or I could introduce a crippling virus to my new Mac so I can go back and get the 15 inch MacBook Pro I wish I had bought. Or maybe it isn’t too late to become a self-trained Olympic gymnast.

Now that I have a slip of paper that validates all of my plans, I feel kind of bad that I don’t have any really altruistic plans brewing. I could be planning to cure cancer. Or restore peace to the Middle East. Or get Ryan Seacrest to quit trying to be a serious journalist. But alas, my plans are mostly selfish.

Besides, you are supposed to say “in bed” after all your fortunes anyway. So my present plans will only succeed if I stick to them in bed. I guess I’d better write some of my plans out and slather them in glue and roll around on them in my California King. Or go home (after the kids are in bed of course) and start planning like a son of a gun tucked under the covers.

I wonder then, now that I know my present plans are going to succeed as long as I stick to them, will I finally stop driving myself so hard to be a success? Kick-back, if you will. Let success, glorious accolades and constant sycophantic praise come to me instead of running after it all the time.

Nah. I think I’ll always obsess about success. And who is to say that the waiter who fished this cookie out of the bag next to the credit card machine didn’t drop my real fortune cookie back in and bring me someone else’s?

Too bad. I really think I could be great at the uneven parallel bars.