stuff

One of the things that I find as I get older is that I'm better able to articulate how hard I find online social rituals, in addition to the hell I find in-person interactions. I can usually fake my way through work-related stuff, but the rest? Who knows. Like, online, how often is too often to initiate chat if you're both online? How much is too little? Is there some sort of way to end a convo that doesn't sound rude? In person, how do talk to? Words? Interests? Seriously, human interaction is overly complicated and I cannot find any source documentation.

(Also? for some reason phone calls are easy to parse. Not sure why that's the one thing that doesn't trip me up.)

my mother told me a story a couple of years ago - she put me into kindergarten a year and a half early because she figured I was so smart and so tall (really, I was the tallest kid in my class even for being so young) and she hoped my social skills would develop.

They did not.  Because, as I told her halfway through that year, the teacher told us how to draw and how to write letters, but no one told us how to behave the right way. She thought I was joking but I was not. 

And now I'm closer to 40 than I like to contemplate and I still don't know how I'm supposed to do this all the right way. 

Oh well.