A social/familial misfit

This Sunday evening, during a break during my songwriting/recording sessions, I logged on to the personal messengers. I found my sister online and started chatting with her. She told me that our cousins were all there visiting her. She also told me that she was chatting from the laptop that she had bought for my mother. She was actually testing the internet connection.

She asked me if I could help her check the bandwidth by video-chatting. I was feeling relatively okay then and said okay. We got connected over poor quality 'broadband' at their end. I saw my cousins huddled together around the computer.

We couldn't really 'talk' to each other thanks to the connection. And there was a whole lot of noise coming from their end. Too many people - three cousins, my sister, my parents, and my wailing niece - and too many conversations going on at the same time. A nightmare for a noise-conscious, ADD-esque, social phobic person like me. I tried working some humor, but my tastes of humor were not quite up to the tastes of my family - innuendos don't work, and any humor that I used came through as heavy sharp-toothed sarcasm, which doesn't really work with my family, except for a few uncles.

So, it was a less than memorable experience and I had to finally make an excuse of having to 'make' my dinner to get out of it. This made me so acutely aware of how much of a social misfit I will be if I ever dared to visit my family as I know it.