I'm Going to the County

Sometimes you act a certain way and then realize that what you’ve done, if you had been male and less attractive, would have been considered borderline creepy. Then, of course, you end up getting confused about what’s what and who’s who and where the line that you so obviously crossed is. You see, I went to a friend’s half birthday party last night at his apartment on the Upper West Side. At the party was a very tall, dark-haired, hairy guy (signs he could definitely grow a beard). I glanced at him when I first noticed him because I tend to find tall, dark-haired, hairy guys pleasant to look at. After glancing a second time, his face registered somewhere in the ethers of my brain. Sparks went off and neurons connected to other neurons and suddenly, it was as though I had seen him somewhere before. I looked at him again to see if he really did look familiar. He really did look familiar.
I spent the rest of the night looking at him frequently to see if I could place where he looked familiar from. “Just go ask him why he looks familiar to you,” a friend said. It’s easy to approach someone you’ve glanced at once or twice and ask them that. It’s a lot harder to approach someone you’ve been obviously looking at for an hour.
It’s possible that at some point in the past I knew how to be discreet, but if there had ever been such a time, it was certainly in my past. Everytime I looked at said man, he looked at me. A couple of times we held each others’ gaze. I know it’s rude to just look at someone, but isn’t their looking back at you considered permission?
“I can’t tell if he keeps looking at me when I look at him because I look familiar to him as well or because he’s starting to get creeped out,” I told a guy I was talking to. (Which I could because he was engaged anyway so it wasn’t rude to talk about other guys. Although I would like to point out that I wasn't talking about this all night, I'm just only citing those two instances because the rest of the night is irrelevant to the story at hand.)
“Go ask him where you know him from,” he said. “That has to be the best pick-up line a girl can use on a guy because even if you don’t know each other, you can then get to know each other.”
And with that, my decision was made. There was no way I could approach tall, hairy man after blatantly staring at him for over an hour with a line that could be interpreted as a come on.
The moral of this story is, of course, that when you’re at a party on the Upper West Side and there’s a tall Jew, go over and make conversation whether he looks familiar or not.