My Twitter handle is @Ansel. I grabbed it as a username a few years ago, back when Twitter allowed you to change your username at will. My parents named me after badass photographer Ansel Adams. I like my name a lot.

But these days, I'm frequently mentioned in highly agitated tweets like this one:


And this:


As it turns out, there's an up and coming actor with my awesome first name and a terrible last name: Ansel Elgort. He's in the new films Divergent and The Fault In Our Stars. He's 20 years old. I checked out his Conan O'Brien interview him and he seems like a cool, if rather bland, dude. His Twitter account @AnselElgort has about 359,000 followers. So there are legions of adoring fans. He is a much more significant Ansel than I.

Hence, I keep getting tweets like this:







It goes on (and on) like that. Creeps me out a bit. I don't have time to reply to all these people and inform them that I am not Ansel Elgort, this person they've seen on a screen who they love. I don't want to follow them. But Elgort, barring a catastrophic public gaffe of some kind, seems poised to get more famous, not less.

I've added, "Not an actor. Not @AnselElgort." to my Twitter bio, but I doubt that will stem the tide. If you looked at my Twitter account for a second, you'd realize I'm not him. I am the helpless electronic object of intense, misdirected affection. This is my burden.