In my house the only proper conversation topics were local sports and current TV shows. My dad waxing that our team not doing well could take up half a dinner. Sitcoms would take up the other half. My brother could quote the Office for, I’m not exaggerating, 30 minutes or more.
As little kids, we were put down for using potty humour in the strongest possible terms, which I guess is sorta fine but I don’t think the intensity was needed. My brother and I got told to stop convo as adults were talking about Big Things. As a got older and started to care about social justice issues, I was told that I’m being too political. My brother in law complaining that his workers had no drive was always acceptable.
I half get it. My parents were prole, albeit settler white prole, and TV was their mental health support. I do wish my parents did therapy, we were expected to do it at an early age (I started at 9!), and a lot of it was just dealing with an imperfect home environment.
Anyhow, I stopped going to family holidays really early, like from 19 onwards. For a long time I thought I was a dick for not getting involved.
Sorry to rant. Honestly I’m not upset now, I’m just wondering if anyone has a similar story.
My chud family members didn’t like “politics” but “politics” didn’t include rants about “thugs on the street”
and the like, and if I didn’t like that topic, there wasn’t much else they wanted to talk about but Gambo Thrones. Not too different from faculty chatter in the break room (by that I mean Gambo Thrones; the racism was lower key), and having to hear that shit twice in one day if I humored them enough to accept the invitation over (free food was free food) with the alternative being “nonpolitical” ranting about how many “welfare kids” they assumed my class had that shouldn’t exist because their parents were presumably “bums that didn’t deserve to breed” was kind of Jokerfying.
NGL it sounds terrible. My childhood was way before GOT and the mass homelessness we see today and I never had to hear a family member discuss those topics.
I’d struggle not to throw a punch.
Anyhow, I eat work lunches outside with a book. Even tho my work colleagues are mostly libs, it still saves my sanity.
The arrangement of the campus was such that I had to eat lunches in the break room or else I’d be standing around a bunch of students (including my own) looking like a dork or baking in the parking lot, and I didn’t want to go through sunscreen every day just to escape DAE LE RED WEDDING and DAE LE SHAME hog talk.
I struggled with that, too. Though sort of like
getting that worked up over “weird,” it sometimes helped to set them off in a way that hit them where it hurt. Like the host of those dinner parties I mentioned was such a chud that he almost tirelessly quoted 
, even the inflection and body language, to be “funny.” He was obsessed enough to even have his hair done the same way. After his usual caliper-waving rants about who was and wasn’t worthy to breed, I asked if he had a crush on 
He got so
and red in the face at that that he was screaming at the top of his lungs and flapping like an enraged goose, banishing me from the dinner party with everyone watching. He even flipped me off as I drove off and I waved merrily back at him. No more dinner party invitations, no more free food, but no more finding excuses not to go. That was a focus of the other chuds in my family in the area, so not much was lost but the free food. 