All of my conversations with my sister in FL. She won't shut up and let me participate. And she likes to talk about her stray cats and drunks down at the river that she visits. Who cares?
Commiserations. I know several people who won't shut up or allow participation. It's often boring, and occasionally very frustrating.
I could probably enjoy one or two conversations with your sister. I'd want to ask her about the cause of so many strays, what she does to help them, and what difficulties there are with the local cat protection society (with neutering and rehoming or euthanising abandoned cats). I'd also want to ask her what she does with or for the homeless people and get her to describe their problems and histories. There would be rich stories there.
I'm guessing your sister might be a kind person in many ways. Or else she wants you to think of her kindly - trying to impress you. Or she's lonely and has difficulty relating to others without realising the cause(s).
One of my sisters had peculiar conversation quirks similar to those of your sis. We live thousands of miles from each other, and didn’t have frequent contact, so when I used to call her on the phone, almost every conversation started out the same way:
Ring, ring. Sis: Hello?
RD: Hi, it’s me, Randy, how are you doing?
Sis: Oh, Randy, I’m glad you called! You won’t believe what’s been going on here since we last spoke! I got into a huge fight with Sandy [our other sister] over nothing more than a big misunderstanding that was completely her fault, and now she’s not allowed over here at my house and I’m not allowed over there at her house, which is fine with me anyway because I don’t want to see her face until she apologizes to me. I even told my children not to speak to their cousins even if they see each other at school, and they can’t play with each other either. But that’s nothing compared to the way the power company threatened to shut off my lights if I don’t pay the three months of overdue bills I owe, so I went to the Urban League to file s complaint that they’re trying to kill little children by freezing them to death. You know how cold it gets here, and it could really happen, because about 20 years ago, they cut off a woman’s heat and she tried to warm the house with a portable generator, and the fumes from it killed her entire family while they slept, and . . .
RD: I . . .
Sis: . . . there’s no way I’m going to let that happen to me. Did I tell you that I have to go back into court to fight for the County to raise my welfare payments? They can’t find my ex-husband, I think he’s left the state, and I know he’s hiding out somewhere in Georgia or Indiana, he has relatives there, did I ever tell you? Anyway, I tried to find work, but with my back pains and migraine headaches, I can barely get up out of bed these days . . .
RD: Hello?
Sis: . . . it’s a struggle to just roll over sometimes, and these doctors expect you to be a millionaire before you can even walk into their waiting rooms. I went to one about a week ago, wait, I think it was last month. When did you call me last? It was a few days before you called, no, it was a few days after you called. I remember because I got there two hours late for my appointment and they had the nerve to tell me I would have to reschedule. Can you imagine that? They knew I was on my way, and all they had to do was move a few people around . . .
RD: Excuse me, but . . .
Sis: . . . Andy [one of our brothers] borrowed my car in August, and I knew it was a mistake to let him do it with the way he drives, and I told him to bring it back with a full tank of gas, which he didn’t, of course. He still owes me for the time I paid his bail when he hit his girlfriend and got arrested. You know how I am about the way men treat women, so if he had not been my brother, I would never have bailed him out, it was my last dollar, too. Do you remember that time I . . .
RD: Listen, I called you because . . .
Sis: . . . met his girlfriend, not the one he’s seeing now, and not the one I bailed him or for, but the one who lives out by the federal building? Maybe that was after you left home when you joined the Marines. Anyway, I never liked her, she was so trashy.
RD: You realize that I joined the Marines 20 years ago, right? I haven’t lived there since then, so I don’t remember any of his girlfriends . . .
Sis: Has it been that long? Seems to me you met her. She had those fake eyelashes that looked like dead butterflies had decomposed on her face, and always wore Spandex that was too small for her so she could make herself look sexy, or so she thought. It really just made her look skirt, I don’t know what he saw in her anyway, but he moved into her one-bedroom apartment, or was it a studio, and she had all of those kids living there with her, and I’m not sure she was taking them to school, she smoked that marijuana, you know, and he was drinking all the time . . .
RD: Er, um, you do realize that I’m the one who called you, right?
Sis: What? Did you? I thought I called you. I had so much to tell you.
RD: No, I‘m the one who started this call.
Sis: Oh.
RD: Did it occur to you that since I called you that maybe I had something I wanted to say?
Sis: You do? Why didn’t you just say it in the beginning?
RD: I tried, but you . . .
Sis: Do you what that reminds me of? There was this time that Mandy [another relative] . . .
RD: There you go again! Listen, I tell you this almost every time we talk. I do not call you to listen to complaints about who is fighting with whom, and whose fault it is! You go on and on and never let me speak, you don’t listen to anything I say, it’s always a one-way conversation, and . . .
Sis: . . . stopped by here and stayed all day long, she had her kids with her, they ate all of my kids’ last food and one of them broke a window. I’m not speaking to her at all.
RD: ((((I give up.))))
It got to the point that eventually, I just stopped all contact whatsoever. I haven’t spoken to her for years now, and I don’t miss it, either. ~
After the third paragraph, I stopped reading...just as I stop listening to my sister. I'll throw in an Uh-huh or a hmm now and then so she thinks I am listening.
A performance review for a Subordinate. The kid is worthless, has an attitude, works in our NYC office - We keep him around for EEOC distribution and avoiding a Lawsuit.
HR in NYC is useless and spineless. There are four qualified candidate, 2 are African American contractors I would like to replace this kid with yesterday. That said he does fill our EEOC quotas.
Element 99 