Had an interesting interaction with a squirrel of my acquaintance. There’s a wooden fence that runs in front of my window and it’s popular with the local kids (squirrels) as a parkour course. There are a couple of them in particular which do multiple laps in a day. Normally they don’t notice me watching, but today one of them stopped and gave me a good long stare (upwards of a minute). It was a surprisingly direct staredown and had a very non-squirrel-y aggression to it and I half expected it to make a lunge for me. It was probably just frightened by its sudden realisation that there was a huge human staring at it, but yeah, I was kind of worried there for a second, in spite of the double-glazed window between us…
I kind of have this thing about reflective surfaces, be they mirrors, darkened panes of glass, stainless steel coffee tureens, spoons, highly-polished car bonnets, &c. The thing I have is that they show me my reflection, and it’s not that I don’t like my reflection, it’s that I get caught in a kind of feedback loop. I look at myself as if I were another person and wait for that person (me) to do something for me (the other other person) to respond to. And so I freeze, staring awkwardly at myself, exactly as awkwardly as a squirrel stares at a human, wondering if it’s about to get stomped.