It usually seems pretty evident to me when I'm talking to someone who isn't listening, or who suddenly decides that jumping on a runaway train of thought is more interesting than my current anecdote. It's really obvious with Cathi, whose eyes often visibly, physically shift when she stops paying attention from direct eye contact to about a foot to my right and slightly down. It makes me wonder about those people who are chronically hard to listen to (for example, Dress Barn-dwelling middle aged women who enjoy launching into a detailing of their lives that rivals the Senate reading of a session's minutes, and do so upon the slightest prompting, including, somehow, yes-or-no questions), and if they think that the off-focus glazed expression of their diatribed objects is normal conversational behavior.
It's not like being aware of Losing Your Audience is some sort of X-Men caliber extrasensory perception. If it were, "...and then I found five dollars" wouldn't be nearly so common. The more logical conclusion, I guess, would be that those people who tell painfully, trivially in-depth stories just choose to ignore the apparent lack of interest in their audience. I can only imagine this is because they either A) like the sound of their own voice, or B) have no one else to talk to. I'm going to go with A, because B makes me sad, and as we all know, ignoring depressing things makes them unreal (I'm looking at you, Real Story of Thanksgiving).
"Some day you are bound to fall in love. They just wouldn't beat you that way. It would be like if God had got Jesus born and saw that He had the carpenter tools and then never gave Him anything to build with them."
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