The other night I was staring at the fridge and figured it was time for a change. Whatever fridge I’ve had in the various places I’ve called home in the last few years has been covered with an ever‐increasing number of fortune cookie fortunes.
But I’m also working to shed what it is I carry around with me—funny how a shed is also something you put in the back of your yard and fill with stuff—yet even in this mindset I thought perhaps there was a way to keep the fortunes and get rid of the fortunes at the same time.
There is a component of Buddhism referring to the impermanence of all things—temporal things, whether material or mental, are compounded objects in a continuous change of condition, subject to decline and destruction. Basically—things are, and then they aren’t, and that’s how it all goes, and it is our own interpretations of these events which “make” us feel badly or goodly about the whole process.
With that in mind I decided to incorporate the text from the fortunes into a widget on my blog. If everything is working correctly, and everything is, you’ll see a random fortune displayed in the top right corner above my Twitter and Instagram icons each time you load a page or refresh the current one. There are several fortunes to enter in, but as I do, I’m throwing away each one as its paper state expires and its new digital state continues on.
And it turns out it is also ridiculously easy to program this all. I was planning on making an evening of it, but it’s three lines of code and a link to a file containing all the text from the fortune cookies. I’ve spent more time writing this post than I did coding the functionality I’m describing in it.
Plus now there’s more room on the fridge for stuff.