Will the real Heather Shuker please stand up?

Turns out my fantasy to spend my days living a self-directed, artistic, waterfront life is currently being lived by another Heather Shuker. Apparently when you write your goals out in hopes of the universe helping you with them, you need to include a GPS location. Services were rendered but delivery was made to Brighton, England.

Now I’ve known of my British alter ego for quite some time. Like any self-respecting, egocentric American, I Google myself. Until I took matters into my own hands and created something for me to find when looking for myself, I found British Heather Shuker. Sure it wasn’t me, but I got to see my name on a website and that was fun.

Fast forward to this past March when I set up my pottery website. LedgeRock Pottery was already taken so I figured branding myself was the next best thing (even though I had the sign) and heathershuker.com was born. Being as I already knew B. Heather Shuker existed, I was kind of surprised that she herself did not own the .com domain. However, then I realized I had no idea how the rest of the world uses the internet and I should really just leave all of that thinking about globalization to someone else and stick to pondering about my microcosmic existence in Dinkytown, Pennsylvania.

That was going along just fine until I got an e-mail for B. Heather Shuker. In the message the sender mentioned she would be forwarding the information via post as well (anyone think, “No post on Sundays” whenever they hear that, or is it just me?). So I just let the message linger in my inbox. Then I got another message from someone else asking for feedback because B. Heather Shuker has an exhibition coming up (apparently at a place called The LUXE this October if you’re interested). Well, what kind of person would I be if I did not forward correspondence to do with her art/business? A person likely to reap bad karma, that’s what kind.

What am I getting at? When I forwarded her messages, I got a response. Eureka! She said she was initially confused because she got an e-mail from herself. Now I didn’t do the kind of drugs in college that might make getting a mysterious e-mail from myself a possibility, but I can just imagine that might be off putting. And she indeed does wish she had gotten the .com site which I found interesting because now I’m wondering if she were a French Heather Shuker (pronounced ‘Shukay’ of course) whether .com would then be desirable as well. No idea.

I told her I would let her know if I decided to get rid of my .com site, but that I doubted she’d have to battle over it as the line for the domain is probably short. But then I remembered the Brits don’t line up, they queue. That’s right, I’m culturally aware.

I recognize that having a person with the same name is not the most shocking or unique thing in the world. There are quite a lot of people to name, after all. Plus, I went to nursing school with two Kelly Millers. (As an aside, that wasn’t fun for them as far as I could tell; more of a pain, really. Each new professor had to be corrected and say something quippy about it. It got old fast.) But I don’t know a lot of Shukers and this B. Heather Shuker is out in the world hustling to make a name for herself which makes a name for me by proxy. Go get ‘em tiger! In the meantime, I will do my part not to be a no talent ass clown and ruin the name for her. A lot of responsibility comes with carrying a name.

But wait, there’s more! In an ironic turn of events the more familiar photographer in my life, Silver Pixels, has since purchased the LedgeRock Pottery domain and is holding it hostage for pottery dishes. So I have a photographer’s domain and a photographer has mine. Life is just like that.