Love From Above

“I’ve always thought that people need to feel good about themselves and I see my role as offering support to them, to provide some light along the way.” ~Leo Buscaglia

A little more than a year ago, I was running to answer the telephone. When I gazed upon the caller ID, I smiled.

It was one of my beloved friends calling. I hadn’t heard from that person in so long, that I seemed to forget the fact that just moments before I was grumbling because I had to run to answer it.

However the conversation was a little unusual. Well, to be honest it was a little unusual for me.

And at the same time it was one of the best and yet shortest telephone conversations that I would ever have.

Here is how it went:

• Me: Hello?
• Them: Hi.
• Me: Hi there.
• Them: I love you.
• Me: Well… I love you too!!!!
• Them: Bye!

And then they hung up.

A few minutes later, I read an e-mail stating that what had just happened was called “A love bomb”. You call someone up and you say to them “I love you” and then you hang up. Saying nothing more or nothing less.

A few weeks later, I attempted to return the favor. But they just would never answer their cell phone. So then finally I waited for the voice mail to kick in, and then I said “I love you” and then hung up.

Months after that, I finally had a cell phone. And I was learning the ins and outs of text messaging for the first time. I knew what their cell phone number was and I plugged it into my cell phone. Then I wrote a text message.

I didn’t write “I love you” though, instead I wrote “LOVE BOMB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and sent the text message.

I’ve never been successful to pull off the love bomb over the telephone. But I’ve left some seriously mushy text messages before to the point that they knew what I was saying and doing. 

And then I got really creative with it. I would find these manipulated photographs of hearts which went along with a bomb going off. I would take them and then post them on Facebook profiles.

Any and all photographs that were relative, I would use.

So I guess in the end that I was actually very successful in pulling it off. And I’ve been doing it ever since.

Then today, when I saw that my beloved friend was having a tough morning, I notice all of the comments that were left of people offering hugs, I dug deep and tossed them another picture of a “love bomb”. And said to them that while they were getting mobbed with hugs, I was sending LOVE FROM ABOVE.

Some call it silly, immature, and cheesy. And of course they just might be right. However, it depends on the kind of people that you are socializing with who would decide that kind of thing. And I also believe that it depends on the kind of sentiment that you are putting behind it all as to whether or not your efforts are going to waste or making an impact.

On the other side of the coin, I believe that sometimes silly, immature, and cheesy is necessary. You never know just when or how you are going to be successful in making someone’s day a lot brighter.

Dismiss nothing in life. Consider everything. And remember that you are never too old. For you may be that ray of sunshine that someone is needing.

 

Pariah To The Petition

“The right of petition, I have said, was not conferred on the People by the Constitution, but was a pre-existing right, reserved by the People out of the grants of power made to Congress.”~ Caleb Cushing

If you are reading this, I need some Calgon. I’ll provide you with an address in which to send it later.

This could be a sort of “part 2” to the previous blog post called “Brainless Warriors”. But it doesn’t deal with all of the content from that post. Rather it deals with part of it. The part of the post where I speak of residents here wanting the community room opened during the weekends.

Last night, it was brought to my attention as an attachment to my e-mail that a petition had been written to go towards the Board of Directors to have the community room opened on Saturdays.

When I read this so-called petition, my IQ dropped 100 points. It was poorly written, poorly worded, and barely took up an inch of space if it would have been printed out on paper.

And because the language of it was so vague, it was basically including everyone who lives here. Including myself. And I was not good with that.

So I played with this thing for about an hour or so last night and fleshed the entire thing out. By the time I got done with it, it was more than half of a page long, and it was more specific to addressing what these certain individuals were wanting to discuss with the Board of Directors.

By comparison, the original draft that I received actually looked like a seven year old child who was trying to stand up to their parents over them being grounded. It was THAT BAD. Nobody in their right mind would have looked at it, and taken it seriously. I sure as hell would not have.

Tonight, a call was made to me to tweak it just one more time to finish off some corrections that were needed. I am hoping that I am not bothered with this any more. Although at this point, since it has been told that “I have a copy of it”, that is only going to be wishful thinking on my behalf.

I do not intend to sign this stupid thing, at all. I honestly do not care if the community room is kept open or if things stay the way that they have been for the past five years. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I suspect it’s going to be bitter. VERY bitter.

Two copies of this petition were made for two residents to go door to door to get people to sign it. Enough lines were provided so that one person from each apartment unit could sign it. But they are not going to get that many signatures for different reasons.

The bottom line to this stupidity, is that the same couple that I mentioned that I was playing SCRABBLE with, want to watch college football on Saturdays. Commonly, their team will be playing on some sports network that they do not have because they no longer have cable. I was there when the cable company gave them their final chance to pay a bill, and they did not so the cable equipment was removed from their unit. Now they wanna go into the community room during college football season, and watch their games on cable. Since cable television is actually provided in the area.

They should just stay with going over to a neighbor’s place to watch television and just deal with it. OR pay their damned bill and get the cable turned back on.

But no, the ones who are responsible for instigating this whole ordeal, are the two previously mentioned. Others are following their path. But I choose not to be led to slaughter.

So who are these two people? The woman that cried about it in the meeting last week because she and her husband have never experienced it being open on the weekends, and the wife of the couple who just gets so intense about college football to the point where it is annoying and uncomfortable for others to even want to socialize and hang out with them to watch football.

This petition, in my own humble opinion, will be given to staff or someone else and then it will be thrown away. The Board of Directors closed the community room over the evening hours and weekends for a reason. Yes, at first I did not like it. But now I am used to it being closed and I personally just don’t care.

So it appears as if I am going to have to avoid answering the phone and the door for quite some time because I don’t want to be bothered by this dumb thing. Even if I did help with the language of it. Doesn’t mean I am for it. I just don’t want it representing me in a terrible light because the person who wrote it down in the first place doesn’t know how to write a petition properly, and sound intelligent at the same time.

Eventually I will have to face the music and explain why I am not foaming at the mouth to place my signature on it. I suspect that I will be the pariah at that point. They’re just going to have to get over it.

However, I will say this: The action as a whole, is respectable. This is the first time that they’ve handled the situation of Saturdays being open in years. Previously, all they have done is complain. One year, they tried to get people so irritated about the community room being closed that they thought an uprising would come. It sort of did, but it wasn’t enough once staff started shooting people down with common sense.

Either way, I really deep down suspect that whomever it is that these resident choose to hand this petition to, that person is just simply going to dump it into the trash. It would not surprise me in the least if that’s what happens.

But I am really done with it. I don’t want to have my name on it, or have my name spoken when it is in conversation.