Doppelganger

• Doppelgänger – n.  A ghostly counterpart of a living person; a double  (Merriam Webster online) 
• Etymology – German, literally a double goer

 

Last week I caught a rerun episode of How I Met your Mother.  In said episode, the gang were talking about seeing their doppelgänger.  The word was used loosely to describe someone who looks exactly like them.  It’s like seeing your double – or the identical twin that you never had. 

The idea of seeing someone who looks like you, only with different hairstyle or hair color, at first seemed pretty funny.  I have wondered about that, too.  I mean, there are millions of people around the world.  What if the Creator at a certain point ran out of ideas for a different ‘face’ and decided to make a carbon copy of each of us – and just placed the look-alikes in different countries, far away from each other. 

I am not talking about having mere facial similarities.  I am talking about exact replica.  And given how the world seems to be shrinking by the minute – people from various parts of the world somehow getting connected or something – there is now a big chance of us coming face to face with our doppelgänger.  Hmm, come to think of it, would that be nice or would it simply be creepy?

I have been told several times that I look like this person or that person.  Whenever I am being compared to someone, I often say that they look like me and not the other way around.  Or I just say that there may be similarities – like shape of face, length of hair, bone structure, etc., but over all we still don’t look alike.  It bothers me to think that I have a common face. 

I went out with this guy once who told me that I looked like his first girlfriend (that wasn’t exactly ideal).    At first I took it as a compliment, but then I realized I wouldn’t want to be someone else’s shadow… or a reminder of a past that didn’t quite work out. 

And then there was this time in my past life –I still had a night life then—when this strange guy came up to me in the middle of the dance floor, called me by a different name and insisted that we knew each other and I was the friend of so and so (like I had an amnesia and I didn’t know who I was).  On hindsight, maybe the guy was just hitting on me – the wrong way, though, because it surely didn’t work.  He merely freaked me out.

Now that I’m thinking about it, what if there’s someone somewhere out there who looks exactly like me… Would I want that?  Would the fact that my face is not unique make me feel any less special?  And would I want to meet my doppelgänger?   

i wouldn't mind the hot bod, too!

 

Interesting thought.  Maybe if people would insist that I look like this, then I wouldn’t mind…

Who am I fooling? If I were 7 inches taller and ten pounds lighter, maybe you will see the similarity somewhere. 

With emphasis on the maybe…

PS… Does having the same hair color count?

What about you? Would you want to come face to face with your doppelgänger?

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photo of Gisele Bundchen via wikipedia