Best ways to communicate with difficult people in SOUNDING BOARD

I’m having some issues with phone calls. I’ve always had them; but the past year in particular I’ve really started to hone in on the why of the issue, and the more I unpack, the more difficulty I seem to have.

In particular, I find it very hard to speak with my parents on the phone. They always want to have these long, drawn-out conversations about things and I just… like, I’ve always endured them because I know that’s what polite people do. But I’ve never particularly enjoyed them. My knee-jerk reaction is to say “I just don’t care”, but that’s not exactly true. I do care about getting whatever information I need to get, I just don’t care about all the stuff in between, in the way. I would rather just know whatever I have to know, or get an email about it, than have it explained to me in minute detail when I already GET IT.

The result is that I don’t call, and I don’t keep in touch. And now that is causing me anxiety lol. I have expressed many, many times that I prefer to text, chat, email, whatever, and my mom always gives me some bullshit about “oh yeah for sure we can use facebook chat!” and then any time i send a message, it’s either left on read or she responds with “cool! give me a call when you get a chance”.

I haven’t missed the phone calls; I think I described them in another entry, but basically when it’s my mom, she’s saying how I should move to canada, and I’m still young enough to find a new career, and i shouldn’t wait, and my dad has money set aside to help me buy a house or go back to school… and when it’s my dad, he’s going off about politics, trump, muslims, jews, or trans people, or americans, or else he’s talking about his engineering projects or some other endeavor wherein he is the star and everyone else is an idiot.

So with all this… does anybody have any strategies for how to do the following:
1. get myself to call at a regular enough interval that i don’t get harrassed, but that it’s not taking up all my free time
2. shorten the length of the calls dramatically; we’re talking I’d like to get this shit down to 30 mins max
3. encourage them to use other forms of communication, i don’t care what… email, text, whatever. I hate WhatsApp, but I’d use it too if that were an option.

All ideas welcome. If you have opinions about me not wanting to talk to my parents, you can keep them to yourself. Similarly, please save me the “I know how you feel but I’d give anything to hear my dead mother/father/relative again”… not interested. Y’all don’t even know lol.