Dear creepy guy who kept staring at me on the bus this morning,

Stop it.

I know it’s hard to take your eyes off me, but that’s just because I’m a little fluffy today. I tried to get my hair cut last night but my discount haircut store expensive high-end salon had only ONE employee on duty and an hour-and-a-half wait. And I had to run nine miles and it was already 6:30 so I really didn’t have time to sit around breathing Barbasol fumes and reading 10-month-old People magazines. And tonight I’m looking at new condos and then I have a date, and tomorrow night I’m going to a Gay Games meeting and then seeing a concert at Millennium Park so now I’ll have to wait until Saturday to have someone mow down my fluff. And in this humidity, not even my Crew® Fiber™ Pliable Molding Creme can tame my thick luxurious hair, so until then I’m probably going to look like a shrubbery. Or a Bee Gee.

But something in your eyes (probably that glint of predatory hunger) told me that my Sideshow Bob resemblance isn’t why you were staring at me.

In the spirit of goodwill (and so you won’t knife me the next time you stare me down like a wounded zebra on a cougar farm see me), though, here are a couple helpful hints from me to you for successfully stalking men (and women, I guess) on the bus:

1. Dress for success. The three-day scruff? The 8-gauge earrings? The drop-shoulder jacket? The blow-dried hair? The pointy shoes from Merry-Go-Round? Please. You looked like you were on your way home from filming a Wham! video this morning. That look may have worked for you before we got the Internets, but in 2006 it just makes you a giant can of Man Repellant™.

2. Subtlety is everything. Your relentless bore-through-people’s-skulls staring says unequivocally that you’ll probably do something to get yourself incarcerated before Christmas. Which studies have shown is NOT an effective way to put people at ease.

3. Get your bod on. People like their stalkers to be kind of hot. In many cultures, it’s an insult to be stalked by someone who couldn't realistically be played by Jesse Metcalfe or Matthew McConaughey in a Lifetime Movie of the Week. Put down your binoculars and your GPS transponders and get yourself to a gym, my friend.

4. Don’t be a dork about it. When you lean over and crane your neck to see what I’m reading and the bus hits a bump and you stumble clumsily to the floor and it’s obvious to everyone around us what you were up to, I have every right to kick you in the teeth when your head is down by my foot. Seriously.

5. Don’t ride my bus. Really. How am I supposed to stalk my own prey each morning when you keep blocking my view? Especially with your voluminous Wham! hair.