A peculiar question floated on my mind as of late. As I sat in the small coffee shop, waiting for my 10:45 pm show of Pride and Prejudice, sipping the lukewarm coffee and glancing at George Eliot's Middlemarch, I suddenly recalled the physiognomy of a waitress, whom I cannot recall her name, yet I was sure she was once an acquaintance of mine, only her importance to me personally was of transient nature. I stole few stealthy glances at her between chapters; she possessed a sturdiness in ways she carried about her work. Her fluent and somewhat familiar movement aided a sense of my knowing her but did nothing to help in recognizing it. She did not possess any recognition on my being. Nevertheless, she is not central to this post; but she did unknowingly give assistance to my tottering conscience. The aforementioned question I put forth is one bound to seem stupid and vain to any outsider looking into my feeble mind. I wondered, in extreme toil, of how much I am worth to this world.

On Friday night the theatre is busy with foot traffic and the floor littered profusely by empty food and drink containers. Certainly the traffic is not here for movie adapted from Victorian novel. I lingered at the lobby; besides me are the concession stands selling over-priced popcorn and soft drinks. I debated internally of whether to go into the threatre and suffer through long minutes of movie previews, or sat at the bench at the lobby and watch disagreeable teenagers touting ostentatiously of their mobile phones and speak in their incomprehensible utterance. How much am I worth to them? Absolutely nothing. But I was once one of them! I was worth something then. Since I am of little value, and they to me, better to find me in a situation in which darkness could shield my general unease. As expected the theatre is devoid of a large crowd, and only few delicate laughs can be heard at witty remark been made on the screen.

As expected the movie ended on happy ending: Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth living happily under the umbrella of holy matrimony. Everything seems so easy in the movie, as lives are condensed into two hour capsules and everything is spoken in deliberate decisiveness, unlike the drone one suffers in present reality.

The next day, my mind still clouded, I went to have dinner with A., a dear friend and a former colleague of mine. Our circumstances in life after university could not have differed much. We went through the insufferable, the unrelenting and the unthinkable. We both find lives to be difficult to adjust to with our bachelor of arts degree. And both of us are now looking forward to graduate school, a respite for our mundane life doing inconsequential jobs.

"I will say our lives could not be worth a bit, except for sentimental reasons," I declared, just as plates after plates of food is put on our table.

"Correct. Our degree means nothing. We work in meaningless, dead-end jobs that are really meant for trained-monkeys. Now we will strive more toward that graduate degree, of which we will be under illusion for two more years," A. supplied with much enthusiasm as we both find our statements reciprocal. An old-time camaraderie instantly refluented in my chest. We dined and drunk and had much fun bowling with her friends well past mid-night. When I got home, leafing through George Eliot's writing, and find a description of Mary Garth, the governess, I found worth learning and an answer to my question. A light rain begin to fall, plashing on dry pavements and giving it a dappled look:

"A vigorous young mind not overbalanced of by passion, finds a good in making acquaintance with life, and watches its own powers with interest."