Day 168 - Dilemma Story

Dilemma Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Lee thought about how his left knee hurt when it got cold at night. That never happened a year ago. A lot of things happened now that didn’t happen a year ago. No one expects to get old. Certainly they don’t expect it to happen overnight. But that is what happens. Everyday. One day your little finger is fine. The next day it hurts for no reason. One day you can eat anything you want. The next day your metabolism slows and on come the pounds. Lee laughed a little at his own self-indulgence. “You’re just like everyone else,” he told himself. “No better, no worse. No more problems, no less drama. We all go through this great game that is life.” Still, he wished his knee didn’t hurt so badly.

Lee was bored. He was sitting around being unhappy, thinking unhappy thoughts. He wasn’t having fun and didn’t want to talk to strangers, so he let his mind wander.

Who am I, why am I here? It was the great existential dilemma. Lee had no idea what that meant. He had heard the phrase bandied about in conversations in college and read it in print once or twice. He never studied philosophy, but he had taken a French film class in college, so it was practically the same thing. There, the characters tried desperately to resolve their inner conflicts while sleeping with the wrong people and smoking lots of cigarettes. He figured there was more to it than that, but somehow the image of a sad Frenchman stuck in his mind. Who got sad after having sex? That seemed unnatural. But it happened a lot in the films he had seen.

Lee never cared that much for introspection. He had just assumed people who wanted to seem cleverer than they really were used terms like this to blanket their own lack of original thought. So while he knew who he was and why he was here, he didn’t really think about who he was or why he was here, thus missing the entire point of his apathy and disillusionment.

Lee had been brought to a networking event at the Trident Hotel bar.  The Trident was trendy enough to be crowded on a Thursday night, but not so trendy that he had to wear a suit.  His friend Steve had decided that the solution to their dating problems entailed going out and meeting new people via a group activity website. The event would be full of young attractive professionals wanting to meet other young attractive professionals. Lee’s expectations should have been high, but Lee didn’t like to make new friends. He did, however, like the idea of meeting females.  So there he was, trying hard to actively listen to people talk about things that didn’t interest him in the hopes that he was somehow making himself a better enough social networker that a female would take note.

Lee was busy thinking about the television shows he was missing when he heard someone across the table say “I’ve seen too many things to make me believe that life is that black or white.” Lee wondered what that even meant. He had paid enough attention at one point to know the speaker was somehow involved in physics. Or was it engineering? Lee couldn’t quite remember. The speaker hadn’t been quite interesting enough for Lee to care to remember. He wondered how someone working in physics-engineering could believe that. Didn’t people like that need to think in terms of black or white? Wouldn’t a building fall down if bricks and mortar weren’t precise?

Lee’s head started to hurt. He was tired and these people were boring. He bit his tongue because he was here as a promise to a friend and was supposed to be busy bettering himself. He didn’t want to cause trouble or upset these people. He was trying to fit in, even though he knew he would probably never see any of them again. It was a social exercise, he told himself; a chance to prove to himself that he could meet new people and give them a chance before writing them off.  Of course he missed the break in his logic. He had already written them off and was just going through the motions so he could tell himself he had given it all a try. But he had dropped that symbolic logic class in college so he wasn’t too concerned with understanding the breaks in his own logic. Like it or not, realized or understood, the only thing on his mind was the quintessential dilemma – “why am I here?”