You know what’s great? Being the silent observer to some conversations I’ve been watching.

I have been sitting in an adjacent row of seats in an airport terminal near a young woman for about an hour now. This lady is absolutely hell-bent on telling everyone who sits next to her that she’s a ‘medical doctor with a fiancé’ as she controls and dominates each conversation whenever each unsuspecting person or group of people sit next to her. It’s as if an invisible dark power pulls a string with a plastic ring attached to her back which makes her recycle the same lines of braggadocio with every pull. Nobody has lasted more than 15 minutes in the chairs that are next to her because her stories aren’t interesting and it’s pretty apparent that everything she says is designed to get people to ask further questions about her and her life successes. That is, until an older couple from Colorado sat next to her.

It seemed that the good doctor met her match as they forced their own conversational agenda on her while not acknowledging anything she said. I knew what she wanted to tell them and saw the frustration on her face when she realized that she couldn’t fit in any of her stories. My attitude here might seem a bit cold but I’ve always been one who appreciates two way conversations with strangers that build naturally vs. having someone announce their station in life right off the bat and then attempt to trap me in a one way conversation about how terrific their life is.

Very satisfied in the last exchange that I just witnessed, I fished my noise-canceling headphones from my bag and cranked up my Gordon Lightfoot playlist.