Week I of Born to Lose Chronicles: How I didn't get Luck Again 

This past Saturday night, after my wife and I dropped off my daughter (think: 12 going on 21) at her friend’s house so she can go to her friend’s friend birthday party (this is starting to sound like an Urban Legend), we decided to go out to dinner.

I asked my wife what she was in the mood for. Note to guys reading this blog: never ask a woman what she wants to eat; always ask her what she is in the mood for. I know it doesn’t make sense, but we are dealing with women here. She said she wanted something different. Quickly, the local strip joint with an all-you-can-eat chicken wing buffet sprung into mind, but then I remembered I was with my wife and not the perky little aerobics instructor who works at my gym (not that I would ever be with her either).

As we drove around, I spied a Pei Wei (pronounced Pay Way). It is a bamboo offshoot of P.F. Chang’s Chinese Restaurant only cheaper. The wait time is minimal and Pei Wei’s service is quicker because they run the restaurant like a fast-food joint only pricier.

We ordered. She had the Thai won ton soup which according to the manager it is the same as Chinese won ton soup with basil added. Plus, she had an order of beef lettuce wraps and a soft drink (Diet Coke). Still thinking about the strip joint, I ordered two pork egg rolls and the Pad Thai bowl with egg noodles and a soft drink (Fresca). Don’t ask me how I could associate those menu items with a strip-joint because I can’t tell you. It may have something to do with being stationed in the Far East when I was in the Air Force, maybe.

We talked, we ate, and we flirted. Then she got up and walked over to the self-serve counter and brought back some fortune cookies. I grabbed three, yanked out the fortune slips and gobbled them up (the cookies). I read my fortune.

The first one read, “The simplest answer is to act.” Underneath this fortune (which was more like a maxim than a fortune), it listed six “Lucky Numbers”. Now since it was six not seven, I knew the numbers could not be the telephone number to the aforementioned gym bunny. So they could only be numbers for the Lotto which is played on Wednesday and Saturday night in my state. On the back of the faux fortune, were the words Bean Sprout and the Chinese Kanji characters for it and how to pronounce it Bean (dòu) Sprout (yá) in case you need to know that. Oh yeah, my Lucky numbers were 21, 43, 23, 10, 54, 15.

Anyway I opened the second cookie and this one read, “Love is a present that can be given every single day you live”. Now I knew I was going to get lucky. Those number were 8, 25, 41, 46, 5, 16. The word on the back was moustache [hú zi]. I lost the third fortune.

We finished eating and headed home. On the way home, I kept thinking about my fortunes and visions of “simply wild acts” and giving “moustache rides” danced though my head. And in “that kind of voice” I asked my wife, “What do you want to do now?”

And in “that kind of voice”, she replied, “Let’s do the groceries.” Suppressing a groan and in a voice of marital resignation I said, “Okay.”

We got to the supermarket when it hit me! I can still get lucky, but in a totally different way. It was 9:30 p.m. on a Saturday. My state’s Lotto drawing isn’t until 11:00 p.m. so I decide to blow two bucks on the “Lucky Numbers” my fortune cum maxim cookies had given me. There was only one problem. One set of numbers had a 54; my state’s lotto system only goes up to 53, so I used it instead.

I purchased the tickets and with the possibility of winning $23 million in my anorexic wallet, I helped my wife with the groceries. We got home and put away the purchases and settled down to our usual routine. She went on Facebook; I went on Open Salon and waded through a bunch of “Live Streaming” and “Strange Scientific” posts hoping to find Tink’s & Grif’s latest Lexus escapades.

I was going to check the Lotto results at 11:15 p.m. but I forgot. Besides I always like to wait until Sunday morning for the results. Think big kid at Christmas. By midnight, Little Trudgette was safely and soundly dropped off at our home by her friend’s mother (who was at the party chaperoning [we’re Cubans and we hold on to our old traditions, so Trudgette will be chaperoned until she is 30 years old has been married for five years]).

On Sunday morning, like the aforementioned kid on Christmas morn, I jumped (more like slithered) out of bed, pulled the ticket out of my wallet without disturbing the moth that lives in the most-of-the-time empty bill compartment, and raced to my computer, logged on, fired up the Internet Explorer and clicked on the Lotto page. As the page loaded, visions of mansions, speed boats, Lear jets, finally being able to use the word “summer” as a verb as in we summer in Cannes danced through my head.

Saturday night’s, numbers: 7-8-10-20-44-47. I lost, so much for getting lucky and simply acting on a maxim.

Oh well, better luck next time.

Just released: Born to Lose Chronicles, Week II: Losers Always Lose, Ibis sitting on a Fence.

  Good thing my wife stuffed a take-out container
with fortune cookies.  

Born to Lose Chronicles:
Week II: Losers Always Lose, Ibis Sitting on a Fence
Week III: The Three Time Loser & The Three Legged Dog
Week IV: I’m Out of Lucky Numbers & I Lost Again!

Text and Take Out Container image ©Trudge164, 2010 

Happy Buddha image source Buddha Statues