I have to yet again express my displeasure with the HOA member who is of the donkey family. I repeat myself, don’t I? I just can’t tell you how much he affects me. I guess we all have one, don’t we? Someone who pushes our buttons and makes us fly right out the window of reason. Bam! We hit the window and then we’re through the glass, just like that.
See, I know that we’re right. I know that. We’re trying to fix the house, and he is blocking us at every turn, even though he’s the one who says he wants his unit fixed first. There are four of us in the HOA, and three of us are reasonable and sane. But him….. He makes me feel crazy, like we’re wrong to insist that we meet, that we reasonably discuss things, that we move expeditiously.
It’s as if he screams at the top of his lungs (figuratively) and is so loud he blocks the rest of us out. We can vote around him on every measure, but we don’t always want to. Dude, we want to get some bids on fixing his damn dry-rot, but he won’t give us a time to enter his unit, just insists that the bid he submitted is good enough. And then he threatens to just fix it himself (no way in hell) because we’re stalling. We’re NOT! Aargh. Then I start worrying he WILL get one of his shady friends (he has a lot of them) to start working on his unit, just like he got them to rip out my back deck. The hole is still there for my tenant to trip over. Removed without permission or authorization. Triple-dipple aargh.
It’s something about his personality. Just being in the same room with him makes my head explode. And getting emails from him in the middle of the night, rambling, illogical emails that go nowhere shoots me right back to slamming into that window. Bam!
We know we should look into legal representation soon, or at least arbitration. Just to shut him up. At least the dues are now paid. That’s an improvement on the last two years. And really, I’m writing not to complain about him (can’t tell, can you?) but to try to figure out how to deal with my reaction to him.
Because really, my reaction is extreme. I obsess. I rehearse conversations with him. I plan emails. I try to guess what he’ll do next, and which tack we should take to meet that imagined move. I lie awake in bed, and I drum my fingers on the steering wheel in traffic. I had almost recovered from Sunday’s meeting, and he spews a stupid email at us tonight that heated me right back up.
He’s bumming me out, yo. I was kind of down all week, and I finally realized that it was because of having to confront him last Sunday. I started to pull up and out of the funk, and then the email lands. I just can’t shake him. Any good suggestions for me? Just telling me not to worry about him, that’s he’s a dummy-head and not worth my time or concern, that’s not going to help. Give me something Buddhist or Taoist, something strong, something loud. I tell myself a million times a day that I’m LUCKY to have this problem. And lord knows I am. I have it so good. I am thankful every day, this is true. But he still drives me up the freakin’ wall. And out the window. Help!
