Put yer eyeballs back in your head

It doesn't really matter where you are. On the bus, on the tram, on the train. In the grocery store, at the pharmacy, waiting at the crosswalk. On your bike, in a car, I do not care, Sam I am, yer getting stared at and for no apparent reason.

Why? This was the question that perplexed me for what seemed an eternity. What is it about my stupid mug that you find so fascinating you'd stare for ages, not in any way that belied admiration or even curiosity but with what looked to be a sneer on your face, or worse, a complete blank. A poker face. Driving me to insanity with your stupid staring, that's why God gave you ocular muscles, so you can look in any direction you please. Why in mine?

For eons, as I say, the matter disturbed me deeply. I read articles, I argued in forums, I collected testimony from red-blooded Germans. Why do they stare? I'd ask. A litany of unsatisfactory explanations would be the reply:

They're not staring. It is all in your head.

You wouldn't know they were staring if you hadn't been looking at them in the first place. It is a return stare. (bullshit, I only looked cos I could feel their stupid eyes boring a hole into that place where my unibrow used to be.)

They think you're interesting looking. (wtf, I'm not in a zoo, and weren't they ever taught that staring at the clinically "interesting" is rude?)

They think you're pretty. (then why the scowl?)

You're a big black woman in a small German place. (bordering on satisfactory, only heard from one German woman, who now lives in Canada and thus, having escaped the insanity, can look at it from a realistic perspective. Still doesn't explain the lack of manners.)

They don't realize they're staring. (donkey crap, how can you not realize you're staring when you're blinking and scowling at someone who is looking you in your stupid eyeballs)

I've never been stared at, and I'm a super model. That means therefore that no one would bother staring at you if they wouldn't stare at fabulous me. It is all in your head. (fuck. off.)

Who gives a crap if they stare or not? (oh... right.)

The least obvious answer, although I believe it to be the most concrete and provable, came to me when my American friend Allison came for a visit. Lovely as she is, she is hardly remarkable in the sense that one must take a second, third and fourth look, risk being run over in traffic and miss their mouths with their forks when she walks past. Nevertheless, during her entire ten-day stay here in the the Aggro City, she was constantly ogled. For the first time, it became clear why:

She was dripping foreignness.

And not just that simple, sometimes endearing (to the great unwashed hippie German populace) way that the Spaniards have, of seeming to not notice whether the sky is green or caring if a meteor was on a collision-course with the Earth. Also not in the (often despised) lost-in-the-white-man's-world way of African immigrants. But in the fully-awake, casually alert, self-confident way of an American woman, who is used to getting what she wants when she wants it, who believes the sky is the limit and who won't settle for less.

We hardly realize this is how we look to Europeans, who naturally, being beaten down, squashed in and generally resigned to being a short poppy for the rest of their lives, interpret such outward appearance to be merely arrogance. It is impossible for them to know that in other parts of the world, people actually believe they can be as great as they want to be, and deserve respect from their peers until they have un-earned it.

Four years on, I have, more or less, lost this outward appearance entirely. Through a wholly subconscious instinct of survival, I have learned to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. A couple of weeks ago I realized how crappy my posture had become: an inadvertent response to being stared at for walking tall and looking forward. It's strange to the natives to see someone doing this: you must be looking for someone in a crowd, or scanning the buildings for an address. There can be no other possible explanation for looking anywhere other than your shoes whilst walking and bashing into other people like moles in the daylight. (actually I think moles have better navigational capabilities than your average German, whose primary function in life is to obstruct the free movement of other humans in his environment, who, unless are walking like a tall popppy, he does not realize even exist.)

Well, but all of this is irrelevant. When I realize now that someone is staring, I take a simple and satisfying course of action: I don't stare back. I put it out of my mind, and forget about it. A strange method of coping, but it seems to work. And because I don't put out those nasty combative vibes, I receive fewer stares.

Or maybe I'm just getting too old and wrinkly for anyone to bother staring at.