talking_at_not_talking_to raze this drives me nuts: people who talk "at" you without making any effort to engage in a balanced conversation, as if you exist only to serve as an audience to their perpetual monologue. i don't mean the kind of person who takes a while to tell a story because they want to give you all the details. i mean someone who will talk for an hour or two straight (or longer), without giving you a chance to say anything, and if you do somehow manage to elbow your way in there for a word or three, you can see in their eyes they're not listening and they have no interest in anything you have to say. they're counting the seconds until they can start talking about themselves again. i always wonder if they know what they're doing and they're so self_absorbed they just don't care, or if there's something in their brain that switches off when it happens. but really, how can you not feel it when you're sucking up all the air in the room? how can you not pick up on the body language of the person you're projectile vomiting words at as they first grow uncomfortable and then gradually lose the will to live? i've known a few people like this. one stands out. there was a guy who talked so much, i never heard his girlfriend say a word. not even hello. nothing. he talked so much, the only way she could communicate was through facial expressions. when they broke up, he wasn't around her all the time anymore. she had space to speak for the first time. turned out she was great fun to talk to. 160820 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I knew someone like this, a friend of a friend: she'd always go on about her own interests and wouldn't seem to listen to others. Not that she didn't do some cool things. Kayaking, for instance. But it was all about what SHE did. If I tried to say, "That reminds me of when I did long-distance running," she'd go on to talk about her own experience doing long-distance running and ignore mine. I don't know how intentional this was, but it irritated me and at least one other person. That was high school/CEGEP (collegey thing in Quebec). I saw her again, though, last year. She'd just graduated from an optometry school out of town and was going to job interviews. We had quite a friendly talk on the bus. She still had some bragging tendencies, deliberate or not (it was near Mother's Day, and she'd just bought flowers AND was cooking for her mom; it was nice to cook for people; here's what she made, etc...) but she wasn't so self-absorbed anymore. She asked me questions and seemed interested in how I was doing. Growing up: sometimes it actually works. Anyway, I can be guilty of talking too much when I get interested in something. I'm embarrassed, though, when I see that other people are bored. I don't WANT to bother people (most of the time) and I want to hear what they have to say. But it's not always easy to realize right away that you're being annoying. For instance, I might have taken a phone call as an opportunity to play random piano tunes in a certain person's ear and they might have been bored. I'm sorry for being so self_absorbed/oblivious. (I've learned my lesson. Next time I'll talk annoyingly about prepositions. I almost started writing about prepositions here, in fact, but I stopped myself just in time.) 160820 ... amy in red I liken it to a cycle of violence, taking place on a slightly longer time scale than you'd expect. I, for one, couldn't talk to many people before I got some stuff out at blather. I was painfully shy, perhaps deadly shy. Although that seems like it probably overstates the case. Not sure. Now I can say what I mean to others, but not necessarily get along with them. I start getting pret-ty scared when they go on and on about how dog lovers are definitively good and cat people, not-so-much. It reminds me of witch-hunting. Why else would you go on and on unless you were stalking something? ( but, that's more of a cat thing, mind you ) i don't enjoy mind melds , nope not at-all. That's why i don't do the innocence mission dog lover thing even though we could all use the perking up that dogs are so good at, right? (This was tangential, sorry) 160820 ... raze hey, i liked listening to you play piano over the phone, honest! how often does anyone get to do that with anyone? it was fun. fun is good. you = good. me at math = also good? 160820 ... amy in red (I probably wouldn't have posted anything at all had I seen e_o_i's post, posted on this post simultaneous to mine, for the re-cord) 160820 ... raze hey, not to worry. all thoughts are welcome in a "johnny in ranting mode" zone. :) 160820 ... e_o_i No, no, Amy, you make a good point! "Talking at" it isn't only the fact of talking over someone, but insisting on one point over and over again. And cats vs. dogs is an odd and oddly common one - as if there was something to be "versus" about, as if liking dogs and liking cats were mutually exclusive. 160821 ... e_o_i Okay, I really need to stick to ONE way of doing subjunctive case. I can't be all "if it were" in one sentence and "if it was" in another. [The "were" is usually considered correct, but "was" may be more favoured by language reformists. Down with the confusing verbs!] 160821 what's it to you? who go blather from