Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful

**
There’s this guy.
I see his leering face everywhere. He’s at the post office; he’s at the pharmacy. He’s in the city when I drive there. Sometimes, I even see him at the mall. It’s really annoying.

I mean, the guy doesn’t scare me or anything. It’s just…it’s weird. Then it started getting weirder. He started sending me stuff in the mail. First, it was just a couple of letters, and I can understand that. If you’re too frightened to approach someone IRL (In Real Life, as we gamers say), sometimes it’s just easier to write them a letter.

But now I’m getting stuff in the mail from him at least once a week. I don’t know what he says; I don’t even open the stuff. And I mean, that kind of stuff I can deal with. Doesn’t take much just to toss a bunch of crap in the recycling, right?

I’ll tell you, though. He’s gone too far. He started calling me. At home. He’d call at all hours of the day…early in the morning, in the afternoons, even late in the evenings. Sometimes…usually…he calls when my husband isn’t home. Sometimes when he calls, it’s just a recording of his voice. That’s the creepiest thing, I think. Just this recording…you know, and at first, you feel guilty about interrupting him, but then you figure out that he’s not waiting for you to respond, and then you figure out that he’s not really talking to you. He’s just talking. He’s talking and he just assumes you’re listening to him.

And he’s even got his friends to call me and send me emails. Like, I don’t even KNOW his friends? But whatever. They’re calling me and sending me email anyway.

This is the worst thing, though: the last few times he’s called, he’s threatened to take something away from me. Or rather, he’s not stupid enough to actually threaten to take something away, but I can tell that’s what he means. He talks about how things are changing and how if I don’t listen to him, Bad Things will happen. People could get hurt. Where it counts, if you know what I mean.

So, I mean, according to the Criminal Code of Canada, I guess you could say he’s stalking me. But it’s *okay*, because he’s *allowed* to do these things. He’s not really threatening me…not *really*. He doesn’t come to my house or my work or anything. I even know his name. I know what he’s up to, and it isn’t going to work.

His name is Tom Lukiwski**.

I’m not making fun of the seriousness of real stalking; I just thought it was kind of funny when His Nibs came home from the post office today and mentioned that my stalker had sent me more mail.

—
** Tom Lukiwski is the Member of Parliament for the riding I’m living in. He’s not stalking me. He sends me crap junk mail that talks about how if I don’t vote for the Conservative party in the next hellection, LIFE on EARTH AS WE KNOW IT WILL END!!!

Like I said, I don’t mean to make fun of the serious business that stalking is. I’ve had a stalker, and it was incredibly unpleasant.