I am a watcher. I like to watch people. It has become a hobby of mine. It’s so interesting to me to just sit back quietly and watch how people are, and how they respond to different situations… especially when they don’t know they’re being watched. I’m NOT a stalker, however. A stalker is sick and twisted, sometimes with a perverted agenda. I’m just basically… curious. Sometimes it can be fun, sometimes it can be annoying.
For example, as I am typing this blog, I am on a jet 25,000 ft in the air. I am trapped by these walls of sheet metal and holiday travelers in a long hollow metal tube. I can’t leave until we land in Denver, and then I have to board another long hollow metal tube to get to Salt Lake City. I’m also sick. I’ve been battling a head cold since yesterday, and I also have a splitting headache, and the added pressure of being so high in the air is amplifying the problem. I’m also claustrophobic, and I’m in a long hollow tube that’s 25,000 feet in the air travelling at about 500mph.
To complicate matters, the man seated next to me has complained from the time he sat down, about anything and everything. And as I write this sentence, he’s STILL complaining. He mentioned something about his wife dying 20 years ago… I personally think she’s just hiding. While some people are humming Christmas carols in the seats surrounding us, this man is just bound to rob everyone of the joy of the Christmas season. The little lady in the seat in front of me has been calling him “The Grinch.”
♫♪ “You’re a mean one, Mister Grinch.
You really are a heel,
You’re as cuddly as a cactus,
you’re as charming as an eel, Mister Grinch,
You’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel!” ♫♪
As I sit here and try to tune Mr. Acid Mouth out, I think about a particular person that I follow on Twitter. This person is one of the biggest whiners I have ever listened to in my life. He’s horribly ungrateful. I can only imagine living with this moody person. What’s interesting is that I am mutual friends with others who follow him as well. Some become angered at his constant negative Tweets, while some try so hard to just be encouraging, but patient, and see if he’ll eventually grow up. Me, I’m a watcher. I never respond. I never get into the middle of it. I actually have hope…
When I think of Dr Seuss’ “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” I think of the timeline. We saw the part of the Grinch’s life where he invaded Whoville and robbed them of their favorite day of the year. And, at the end of the story, we see how an incident turned him into a new creature with a change of heart. What we didn’t see was the years before the year that he had the change of heart. If there was a real timeline in this story, we’d probably see that the Grinch had been this way for a long time. The Grinch was our hero at the end of the story. What we also didn’t see are the people of Whoville who gave up on any chance of a reformed Grinch long before his change of Heart.
♫♪ “You’re a vile one, Mister Grinch,
You have termites in your smile,
You have all the tender sweetness
of a seasick crocodile, Mister Grinch,
Given a choice between the two of you
I’d take the … seasick crocodile!” ♫♪
My fellow Tweeter who is ungrateful, and whiney, and sometime downright rude to some people could very well have a change of heart of his own sometime in the future. For some people, it may be too late. Some will understandably grow tired of the griping and complaining blasted to their twitter pages and iPhones, and they will eventually block this person so that they don’t have to see his Negative Tweets. Then there are those who will hang in for the long haul… perhaps just out of morbid curiosity, or perhaps they know that this person will have a hard time making new friends after reform.
Either way, you are what you tweet. And, if you are whiney and fussy, you stand a chance of no one wanting to be around you. (In fact, part of my “watching” has been seeing his number of followers decrease.) But on the flipside, if you are someone who is positive and cheerful, you will likely attract people, because you’ll be the type of person that more people want to be around.
It’s Christmas time! Don’t be a mully-grub! Don’t be a Grinch! Be happy, and help bring Christmas joy to those around you. Even the man sitting next to me has finally piped down. (He fell alseep.)
The Alarida Journey 