My life as Harry Potter

It happened again last week, not that it was unexpected, but this time it was a little harder to ignore.

"Harry Potter!" some guy shouted out as he walked past. He pointed his finger at me as well, as if I weren't the only person at that table who vaguely resembled J.K. Rowling's cash cow.

Some of my high-school friends and I were sitting outside one of my favorite cafes in my hometown catching up on one anothers' lives when the exclamation arrived. We were silent; I wasn't sure how to respond.

Usually, when I'm identified by that name it's preceded by something like, "Hey, do you know who you look like?" or, "You look a lot like ..." This time it was simple and straightforward:

"Harry Potter!"

I know I'm not the only one who suffers from this. A friend of mine who worked at The Daily looked like a slightly older Draco Malfoy, and probably could have played the part had he not been such a nice guy. Outside of Hogwarts many people try to identify themselves (or are forcibly identified) by their celebrity counterparts. My high-school yearbook had a celebrity look-alike section and there's even a MTV program called I Want a Famous Face in which people slice and dice their bodies to become more like the people they admire.

Is this raising a warning flag for anyone?

This phenomenon is part of something bigger. It reminds me of an English class discussion I had one time about Charles Dickens' foggy London streets. The discussion was based off an essay and an accompanying Dickens passage that made me question from where London's fogs come.

The passage drew a dark picture of an archetypal foggy London street -- something a frequent reader of Dickens will recognize. And the essay took on the question of London's fogs in a meteorological sense.

According to my professor, it wasn't until about Dickens' time that the characteristic yellow-brown fogs started to appear -- or maybe it wasn't until Dickens started writing about them that Londoners started to notice. Were the fogs a result of Dickens or was Dickens a result of the fogs? That is, did people only start noticing the fogs after Dickens became so famous, in part, by writing about them, or did the fogs only coincidentally appear around the same time as the author?

The essayist argues the former, but that's not the point. The point is that more and more we see our world as if we were watching a movie or reading a book. You know what I'm talking about if you've ever been feeling particularly emotional and listening to the radio when a moving tune starts playing. When this happens to me I begin to feel like that song is the soundtrack to my life and soon enough I'm just an audience member to a drama titled "The Life of Brian."

I don't think I'm the only person who does this.

I'm not philosophical enough to know why this happens -- why we want to see ourselves as if we were in a movie. Maybe it provides a sense of security -- we want to think that there is going to be a happy ending (as there often are in books and movies). Or, maybe we've become so inundated with stories that we can't help noticing the similarities.

In any case, that guy outside the cafe who was the umpteenth person to point out the similarity between the teenage wizard and me probably didn't mean any offense. He won't be the last person to point out the resemblance: As Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Potter in the movies, gets older the number of sightings will only increase. I would just like to point out, however, that I came first. I'm resigned to the fact that nobody will ever point at the silver screen and shout "Brian Alexander!"