You finally get a chance to speak at dinner, so you take a breath and start: "I've been thinking about—" Your friend nods encouragingly, which you recognize as a trap. By word three, they're already launching into their own story about something vaguely related. You sit there nodding like a dashboard toy, waiting for a conversational red light that never comes. Eventually you just adopt their energy and start interrupting them mid-sentence, and somehow you both feel great about it. Democracy.

My friend asked me how my weekend was. I started explaining, got three words in, and he launched into a twenty-minute story about his nephew's soccer game. When he finally stopped for breath, I said, "That sounds great—anyway, I was hit by a bus." He nodded and immediately told me about the time *he* almost got hit by a bus.