{"id":3883,"date":"2017-06-22T15:12:13","date_gmt":"2017-06-22T13:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=3883"},"modified":"2023-02-07T14:46:10","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T13:46:10","slug":"my-doppelganger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=3883","title":{"rendered":"My Doppelganger"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Title: My Existential Angst<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m on the tram sweating audibly into a small puddle on the floor. I am capable of sweating in biblical proportions and pretty soon I expect to see pairs of animals running alongside the tram. In the hopes of distracting myself from the misery caused by traveling through a steaming hot city in a metal box with no shade in sight, I am looking at the faces of pedestrians. Happy, cool pedestrians.<\/p>\n

Then I see a guy I know as an acquaintance. He\u2019s the husband of another acquaintance, a nice enough chap. He\u2019s short and brown-haired, he\u2019s stocky. He is swinging his arms as he huffs along down the street in the determined yet stuttered stride of the short-legged. It then dawns on me that he looks exactly like me. He is my Doppelganger. This troubles me.<\/p>\n

Like many men, I consider myself far better looking than is evidential in the aesthetics of my biological makeup. This guy is OK looking, but he’s not exactly handsome. Reason states that if I am his Doppelganger and he’s not handsome, well, guess what? I am seeing what everyone else is seeing. A short, stocky dude chugging down the road like a Hobbit heading towards a tavern. And if that\u2019s what we all see when he\u2019s walking down the road, that\u2019s what they all see when I\u2019m walking down the road.<\/p>\n

As a side issue, this damages my (I think reasonable) perception of my life as a movie. Let\u2019s be honest, people. We all do it. We have a voice over bespeaking thusly of drama to come or just come above an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. And why not? Our lives are essentially movies, aren\u2019t they? A mix of cringe and romantic comedies, moments of erotica, drama, adventure, and horror, interrupting the 97.3% of our lives that encompasses watching Frasier, scrolling Facebook, and asking people what they want to do that night.<\/p>\n

But the real issue is that I am getting a glimpse of what strangers see when they see me. We usually don\u2019t apply dimensions or develop a personality for someone we see walking down the street. I don\u2019t think about what their friends like about them or if they are reliable or not. If I notice them at all, I make a very hasty judgment usually based on how good-looking they are and depending on the outcome of that, I decide whether or not to imagine them in their underpants. Now I am getting that unbiased view of myself. Remove the sense of humor and the personality, and this is physically what others see. And I definitely don\u2019t want to picture him (me, us) in his (my, our) underpants. It\u2019s like being shown a picture of myself drunk at a party. The horror.<\/p>\n

I careen towards a bright side by joking that I might hop off  the tram and suggest to my Doppelganger that we tramp off to a pub in Middle Earth. It\u2019s almost time for elevenses. I come out of my funk to realize that I am almost at school and I am cooler. So aside from ten minutes of a crippling existential angst that threatened to send me into a desperate spiral of self loathing, I have stopped sweating. I’m counting this as a win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m on the tram sweating audibly into a small puddle on the floor. I am capable of sweating in biblical proportions and pretty soon I expect to see pairs of animals running alongside the tram. In the hopes of distracting myself from the misery caused by traveling through a steaming hot city in a metal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3884,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/what-others-see.jpg?fit=415%2C684&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-10D","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3883"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5773,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3883\/revisions\/5773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}