June 19th @ Free Times Café

We are regularly told that we are all unique. We are like snowflakes in that no human being is exactly the same as another (and how do we know that about snowflakes anyway, wouldn’t they melt when you got them to the lab?). The exceptions of course are identical twins or triplets or quadruplets etc., who are exactly the same and are therefore great subjects for medical testing and horror films.

But is that really true; is there no one who looks just like us? When I was in university there was a guy that I saw occasionally at a pub and he looked just like me, and he held his beer just the way I did and he slouched against the wall holding his beer just like I did. The Germans have a word for this – doppelgänger – meaning someone who isn’t a twin but looks just like you (and so since we have words for this too why are we using a German word anyway, especially one with that annoying umlaut over the ‘a.’)

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