Just keep swimming.

There's a creepy guy at the pool who has decided I'm his new best friend.

He's older, probably late sixties. He's really, really short and overweight and is covered with scary looking moles. Hello, Kettle. I'm Pot. My, you're looking black today. He has a Hitler-style mustache (just bushier, somehow), gold hoop pirate earrings and he wears man-pris. In fact, just imagine Hitler older and fatter and friendlier and gay and there you go (though I don't think creepy-pool man is gay).


And he wants to be my buddy.

It started a couple of months ago when he shared the lap lane with me. Now, even if there are open lanes, he hops in mine. Fine, I can deal with that. But then he started getting chatty. He'd stop me mid lap to talk. I tried being polite. I really did. And after a month or so I finally just told him flat out that I couldn't keep stopping to talk because I only had a limited amount of time to exercise.

Didn't help.

So then I started moving to an open lane if he got in mine. He didn't take the hint. He followed me.

Then I got my waterproof MP3 player. I thought that maybe it would make it easier--I could totally pretend that I couldn't hear him talking to me. And I'm swimming, so it's easy to pretend I don't see him talking to me. Nope. Now he touches me to get my attention. I am not a toucher, people. I'm not a hugger. I'm not even a hand shaker (hello, germs!). So the touching was too much.

Today I snapped.

"Please, I don't like being touched. I'm here to exercise. I'm not here to socialize. I really would just prefer to swim and not talk anymore."

He said sorry. I swam off.

Then I saw him crying.

I made him cry.

Geez, people, I'm awful.

Especially because I pretended I didn't see him crying and just kept swimming.