"So, do you want to hear about my problems now?!"

Place: Indonesia

Participants: Luke and Mr. J

Luke is wandering alone in the resort hotel area, catching up on some reading and generally taking it easy on his own (the reason why we suddenly have moved the setting to Indonesia will be explained in a later post when I have a little more energy).

Mr. J happens to run into Luke and starts to ask a number of personal questions in the vein of "How are you doing?", "No, how are you really doing?" and "Is everything ok with you and your girlfriend?". Luke gets a little surprised by these questions since he has given no indication that there is any reason to believe that there are any problems and basically repeats; "No, everything is fine" a number of times in slightly different variations. After a little while Mr. J gives up and a short awkward silence happens after which Mr. J throws out the question; "So, do you want to hear about my problems now?!".

Please let that sink in for a moment. "So, do you want to hear about my problems now?!"

Mr. J also has a very distinct way of asking questions in a sort of passive aggressive way that is hard to properly convey here in text. It really has to be experienced to be understood and is quite fascinating in a disturbing kind of way.

I find it very sad and very funny at the same time how Mr. J desperately tries to fish for problems in the hopes of creating a bonding opportunity, realizing that things are not really going the way he hoped but still not giving up and manages to steer the conversation into his problems.

Luke was so surprised by the turn in the conversation that he could only throw out a "yeah... sure...".

And yeah, let's not go into the specific problems in question at the moment since those could possibly take weeks to lay out properly in text...