With a funny name like Mieke Eerkens, I always felt smugly confident that this moniker was mine and mine alone. I was a true individual. Well, thanks to the Internet, that illusion has come crashing to the ground, and I have tragically discovered that I have a bowling, Jesus Christ Superstar acting, "braless" (huh?) doppelganger. I would like to publicly apologize to the John Smiths and Mary Joneses out there, to whom, I shamefully admit, I have always felt a titular superiority. Oh, cruel life, I have learned my lesson and have gained humility. Can't the other Mieke Eerkens get married already and change her name?

I received an e-mail from this other Mieke Eerkens, living in a northern province of Holland. She wanted to swap stories. I hit delete, my already fragile (see previous entry) sense of identity now reeling, and peered through a slat in my blinds. She’s out there, using my good name. Swap stories? Nay, she is now my name nemesis.

The race is on, and she's nipping at my heels. I can no longer rest on my laurels (not that I have much in the way of laurels to rest on). For should one of us succeed in life to the point of recognition, the other one would have to relinquish the name, or suffer having to say “No, not that Mieke Eerkens” a hundred times a day. I don't want to become another Elizabeth Taylor, the editor whom I called today at the book section of the Chicago Sun Times.

So far, I’m in the lead, with the majority of Google hits falling my way. But she’s catching up, having formerly just popped up as a few bowling league scorecards, but now threatening my reputation with her braless this and Jesus Christ Superstar that. But at least now I can pass off that bad poetry that won’t go away. “Oh, no. That wasn’t me. That was the other Mieke Eerkens.”