As a human being, you are allowed to be anything.  You can be beautiful, you can be ugly, you can be rich, you can be poor, you can be conservative, you can be liberal, you can be straight, and you can be gay.  No problem as far as I am concerned.  But what you are not allowed to be in my book is to be a crashing bore.  And by God we have more than a couple in our extended family who shall remain nameless for obvious reason.  Whenever I am about to be paid a visit by these worthies, my heart starts sinking, because it is so utterly soul destroying to be in the company of a crashing bore. 

Now who is a crashing bore you might ask.  Well, anyone would does not see the funny side of life, anyone who does not see the tragic side of life, in fact, anyone who doesn’t see human existence in all its shades and dimensions.  One major characteristic of a bore is that they are so much in love with their own voice that it is impossible to get a word in edgeways.  The more wrong they are, the more righteous they get, but for that you first have to be able to make your point which is not easy.  Another thing is their remarkable capacity for passivity and shutting down.  While you have shown the courtesy to listen to them while they were droning endlessly about their son or their son-in-law or their extraordinarily talented daughter, it could be also about the tribulation of their job, about some incident in the distant past, something you are hearing for the nth time, but the moment you try to bring something else to the conversation, to introduce a new element by saying something, that’s when their talent for shutting down is revealed.  They will not only become invisible, even though they are right in front of you, but they will become impervious to what you have to say about anything.  You would be perfectly justified in thinking that it might be more profitable if you banged your head against a brick wall!  They will have you believe that just because they have piled year upon year of simple but monotonous living, they are the repository of all the wisdom, and you will only gain by listening to their spiel.

I can only say that they are a wet blanket, they are rain on my parade and they are on the march of humanity.