Wave of humiliation:

So, my neighbor saw me in my underwear. And it wasn’t even my good underwear. It was my best bra, but the underwear? Not even the second tier.

How could this happen, you wonder? When did my life turn into a zany sitcom? Yesterday at about 5:30, evidently. I came home from work, and like I never, ever do, immediately took off my nice work clothes and hung them up so they wouldn’t wrinkle and waste away on the chest at the end of my bed. My bedroom closet is on the small side, so I keep a lot of my clothes hanging in the coat closet in the other room. After dutifully hanging them up, I walked through my main room back towards my bedroom, clad only in my bra and panties, and that’s when I noticed that the blinds on my kitchen window were open.

Well, I thought, I should close those blinds, since I’m walking around in my underwear. And evidently at that exact same moment, a butterfly flapped its wings in South America, causing a breeze that looped through the hemisphere like those little dotted Family Circus lines, culminating in that extra gust that boosted my neighbor as he sprang up the steps, and, like he sometimes does, paused to knock on my window as a friendly hello, precisely at the moment I reached for the mini-blinds, standing in my kitchen clad only in my underwear.

Hey— he started, and then I went, Aughhh! and he yelled Whoa! and then I screamed and shut the blinds and ran into my bedroom and hid under the comforter for the next 20 minutes.

I relived it all night long, in my head and while recounting it to friends, and I have come to the harsh realization that due to this incident, in combination with the bug incident, I am now officially not only someone’s Crazy Neighbor, but someone’s Crazy Naked Neighbor. Maybe this is some whacked-out karma for noticing his boxers while we worked on the pilot light in the basement, but at least those were shorts that were underneath his clothes. It’s just not fair. Usually when someone sees you in your underwear, you kind of had some idea that they might see you in your underwear, and you could prepare for it, whether by picking the best ones out of the drawer, or standing in a more alluring pose, or lighting some candles and putting on some Morphine, or at least just dimming the goddamn lights. Standing in your well-lit kitchen at 5:30 pm in the old VS cotton bikinis? Not so hot.

I can’t believe I had already taken off my knee-high leather boots. That would have made it at least a little cool, because then I could be the Crazy Naked Neighbor Who Thinks She’s a Superhero.