Creeper in the Window

Finished my final essay for Russian Studies. Now I just gotta wait for grades to come back.

My brother was in some dance recital. He joined a Dance Theatre group and they did a performance based on a three song mashup from the movie Hairspray.

Sounds like it went pretty well. There were a bunch of other groups as well, including Irish dancing, Latin, Tap, Seductive, Contemporary, Jazz, Hiphop, and Sword Dancing. There may have been others as well, but that's what I remember him mentioning.

Last time I was in Guelph, my mother told me the neighbour was staring at me through the window.

They live in a basement apartment, so the window is closer to the ceiling, and to look into the apartment a person would have to get low.

I turn to look at the window, and indeed there is a man squatting and staring directly at me, eyes bugging out of his head, but it isn't our neighbour.

As soon as he sees me see him he runs away. I'm grateful for his absence, but that reaction shows that he's not just socially oblivious or something, and he realizes what a faux pas it is to stare at someone through their window.

I'm ranting to my mom about how creepy that was when he comes back. He motions at me to meet him by the front door. He's got a dead serious expression on his face and his gesture is sharp and weirdly authoritative. I'm a large man, and I'm unused to strangers being so demanding and authoritative on a first encounter. He walks out of view before waiting for my response.

I say, "He wants me to meet him?" Mom's like, "Well, you're the big guy."

Oh screw that. Letting people you don't know, who stare in your window tell you what to do gets you killed. I crack the window open and shout "HEY BUDDY!"

Guy comes back and asks about one of the upstairs neighbours. I tell him, "He lives upstairs and our apartment doesn't connect. Can't help ya." and close the window.

I shouldn't have even engaged him that much, to be honest. Should've just closed the blinds.

Mom tells me "Before you noticed him, he walked by the window with a shovel."

Now I don't fully trust my mother's eye witness testimony because she initially mistook the guy for our neighbour, but the image of him with a shovel certainly does ramp up the creep factor. Makes me imagine him waiting outside the front door where he gestured me to meet him, ready to conk me with a shovel.

Maximum level creep right there. I won't soon forget the image of him, with his deadpan expression and hyper-focused, wide eyes, staring at me, squatting outside our window, with a shovel just out of view.

In all probability he didn't have any ill intentions. Or if he did, they were perhaps intended for the neighbour. But man. Don't stare into strangers' windows please.