Last Saturday, I made the fatal error of attending a dinner party and standing too close to a corner.

It was a perfectly pleasant apartment, filled with equally nice people holding reasonably priced wine. I was leaning against a bookshelf, minding my own business, when a man named David approached me. David did not say hello. David did not ask how I knew the host. Instead, he immediately launched into a highly detailed, chronological account of his journey into amateur gravel cycling.

At first, I attempted to participate in what I foolishly believed was a conversation. During a rare, two-second pause where David inhaled, I seized my opportunity. I mentioned my recent, highly specific obsession: a 1991 pine-green Mazda MX-5, the Limited Edition 1.6. I thought this was a perfectly reasonable pivot. We were, after all, discussing wheeled transport and expensive hobbies.

David looked at me. His eyes glazed over entirely. He paused for exactly half a second, stared directly through my forehead, and said, "Right. Anyway, the aerodynamic benefits of my new carbon-fibre water bottle cage..."

He hadn't heard a single word about my precious Mazda. He had only heard a gap in the audio where he was momentarily not speaking.

For the next twenty uninterrupted minutes, I stood there. I nodded. I offered the occasional, desperate "Wow" and "That's crazy." And a terrifying realisation washed over me: I was not in a conversation. I was in a hostage situation. I had been demoted from a human being to a prop.

Why do we allow ourselves to be trapped by the party monologuer? And more importantly, why do people like David do this?

If we set aside grand, existential philosophy for a moment, the American sociologist Charles Derber provides a sharply practical explanation. In his book The Pursuit of Attention, Derber introduced the term Conversational Narcissism. He contended that in modern social interactions, there is a constant, subtle struggle for attention, and we are all vying to keep the spotlight on ourselves.

Derber classifies everyday conversations into two kinds of reactions: the "support-response" and the "shift-response." If I mention a car, a simple support response would be, "Oh, are you considering buying one?" It stays focused on the speaker. A shift-response immediately returns the topic to the self: "Sure, it is a classic, but I prefer my gravel bike..."

But David didn't even bother with a polite shift-response. He executed a complete conversational hit-and-run. He simply waited for a gap in the audio to resume his own broadcast.

Derber suggests that good conversation resembles a game of tennis, with the ball volleyed back and forth. David, however, was playing conversational golf. He was simply standing there, hitting his own ball repeatedly, completely ignoring whatever I was doing. I wasn't a participant in his game. I was just the passive strip of grass he needed to practise his swing.

I wasn't a person to him. I was conversational turf. It is a very heavy burden to be a human golf course next to the cheese board.

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Eventually, I escaped from David by pretending I desperately needed to find a coaster. When I finally arrived home, deeply drained from the emotional labour of being treated as an object, I found my cat asleep on the armchair.

If I am a tragic, polite hostage to the social contract, the cat is the absolute master of boundaries.

I sat down and started complaining to her about the party. I spoke for about thirty seconds. She opened one eye, assessed the tone of my voice, and decided my monologue offered no tangible benefits (such as wet food or structural warmth).

She did not perform the "polite nod." She did not say, "Wow, crazy." She simply stood up, turned around, showed her back to me, and began forcefully washing her left leg.

It was a masterclass in refusal. She clearly stated, "I am not here to serve as a vessel for your story. I am an independent individual, and your story about David is boring."

She owes no one an audience. She cannot be cornered because she refuses to respect the invisible boundaries of politeness that confine the rest of us.

I stopped talking. The cat finished grooming her leg and went back to sleep. The silence in the apartment was beautiful.

I thought about David, probably still at the party, currently holding a different person hostage near the coat rack. I realised that the only reason the party monologue works is that we are too afraid of being "rude" to simply walk away. We endure the psychic drain of being a prop because we value social harmony over our own sanity.

Next time I find myself stuck listening to a twenty-minute lecture on bicycle gears, and my attempts to discuss a perfectly good Mazda are ignored, I will not just nod along. I will channel my cat instead. I might not aggressively wash my own leg in public, but I will master the art of the blank stare, the slow turn, and the silent, unapologetic exit.

See you next time. Keep walking away,

Asena

RABBIT HOLE

Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things (I don’t promise) I have read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click the links below to explore more.

Reading Sándor Márai’s Embers is like being the only sober person at a 4:00 AM afterparty where a disgraced Duke corners you to explain, with terrifying exactness, why his best friend didn’t pass the salt in 1901. It is a literary hostage situation in which the ransom is your undivided attention, and the weapon is a perfectly balanced sentence. 

I remembered my old friend, a 15th-century book that seems to have been written by an herbalist who fell asleep on a pile of fermented rye and woke up in the fifth dimension. It’s called the Voynich Manuscript, and it is the ultimate medieval "Trust Me, Bro".

Imagine a 240-page book, written in a beautiful, flowing script that appears incredibly significant, yet no one in human history can read it. It’s not a code. It’s not a cypher. It’s "Voynichese," a language that exists only in this particular stack of vellum.

For 600 years, the world's greatest codebreakers have stared at this book until their eyes bled, and the book just stared back, refusing to even offer a single "Hello."

There are over 100 botanical drawings. The problem? None of them exists on Earth. It’s like the illustrator saw a sunflower once in a fever dream and tried to describe it to someone who had only ever seen a lobster.

You can see the book below:

I saw this photo of someone holding a long stick and wondered, “What’s this fella doing?”

He is a professional Knocker-Up. Picture this: it’s 1880, and instead of a phone shrieking at you from your bedside, a gentleman called Barney walks by and taps your window with a bamboo stick. 

It was precise craft; they had to tap just loud enough to wake the paying customer, but not so loud as to wake the neighbour who was too cheap to pay the weekly fee. Honestly, I believe that's one of the jobs that should return. Imagine how much more productive society would be if, instead of checking your notifications at 6:00 AM, you had to explain to a man with a fifteen-foot bamboo pole why you’re still in bed.

That’s it. You’ve reached the end. Thank you for reading. ❤️ Your reward this week is this sad-looking avocado, which might have heard a negative comment disguised as “constructive” criticism. (Black Rain Frog, Breviceps fuscus).

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