So, Burdo, as a Japanese American, you would think I would at least know more about Japanese culture than my wife, who's white American.

But today, she told me that apparently in Japanese culture around New Year's Eve, and I don't even know if this is true around New Year's time, it is traditional to do spring cleaning.

So it'd be like New Year's Eve or New Year's Day cleaning, where you clean up all the clutter, you get rid of stuff, you take stuff to goodwill, you.

To start the New Year and on the good foot?

Yeah, which I might have been enacting this whole time, because one of the things that I've done in the past number of years, at the end of the year, I try to answer all the emails that are left in the documents saved from clean house.

Clean house, yeah. And start afresh, so I have a bunch of emails that people have been asking you and me, so let's get to it, what do you say?

Let's do it.

This is the Psychology in Seattle podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirk Honda, and although these emails spark joy, I want to get to them and get them off my docket.

What do you say? Who are you, Bruto?

My name is Umberto Kasnea, and I'm an international corn maze debunker.

Listener Eve has a question. Actually, this is kind of a trigger warning.

This is about stalking, potentially a real stalking situation, so skip forward about 10 minutes.

She says, I met a guy on Tinder one time for a public coffee date.

He gave me a creepy vibe on the date. He questioned our relationship status and said, don't leave me.

I turned him down gently, and after two weeks, he showed up at my workplace.

I gathered. I should be very clear. The next time I meet him that I, and tell him that I'm not interested and never will be interested, and then I should stop any communication.

I'm afraid, though, that his stalking behavior might turn into violence.

Please advise Bruto. What do you think?

Wow. That is intense. I, I do think clarity is necessary, even if it doesn't work, because at least you've set that antecedent.

Like, for example, if you, hopefully not, but if you have to get the authorities involved, I think my, my, my layman perspective is that it'd be great to say, hey, I have clearly, like, here's the text message or here's whatever.

But I will say that if I were in, in this boat, which I've never been luckily, but if I were, I would be scared.

So I would probably get my friends involved. Like, I would talk to my friends about it too, like, just have a, a sense of community, you know, because it's intimidating.

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