It's come to my attention that people all look very similar. My mom is fond of saying that people are funny looking. When you think about it, we really are, but it's never something I've dwelled on.
Lately, though, I keep seeing different people in the faces of others. Confused?
Growing up, and particularly in my later teens, people at church thought I looked an awful lot like another girl that went there. Apparently our resemblance was so uncanny that I would often get mistaken for her. Considering both of us had a long history of attendance (I'm talking most of our lives here) it struck me as kind of odd that people couldn't tell us apart. People, I might add, that also had a long history of church attendance and would, you'd think, have figured it out. I guess age just brought us together as twins.
That wasn't the only time people thought I had a twin. One summer I worked in a mess (it's been so long I've forgotten if that's even the proper term) at the navy base. There was another girl there a year younger than me that had the same job. Don't ask me what it was, we just cleaned stuff, stocked stuff, and sometimes cut stuff. Totally glamorous stuff. People used to get her and I confused all the time. People would come up to me and continue conversations that had never happened, and then swear when they saw the two of us side by side that we were sisters.
It was weird.
I guess I'm just really common looking.
I'm not the only one, though.
A few minutes ago I just saw a Jimmy Fallon lookalike on Douglas, set apart only by a receding hair line and fifteen pounds. I've seen people that look uncannily like my husband before. A few weeks at baseball there was the identical twin of a friend's brother. That was spooky. Same body language, same clothing sense, same demeanor, same body shape although slightly heavier. Eerie stuff.
While watching 16 and Pregnant one night (Karl's show, believe it or not, not mine) one of the teen moms looked exactly like someone I know. Sure, this sixteen year old had a little Latina thing going on that was unique to her, but everything else, including how she talked (minus, of course, her accent) was identical. I couldn't watch the show because it was just too weird.
And it keeps going. When I first watched Firefly I thought Jewel Staite looked like someone else I knew. New guy at work? Alan Tudyk (less so now, but still...). The relationship between those two is just a weird coincidence, by the way.
Anyway, balding Jimmy Fallon inspired me to think deep thoughts. I guess, when it comes down to it, we do all look quite similar. It's like mice. If you ask me, most mice look identical. I'm sure when it comes down to it, though, they're totally unique.
Look at us, we all have two eyes, a nose and a mouth which is pretty basic. We're not really that different after all, eh? Mice probably think we're all the same, too. We're just so used to identifying the distinguishing marks on people like ourselves that we can easily point out the differences. Mice are probably really good at telling the differences between each other through eye spacing, whisker length, and overbite size.
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