"Us" and "Them" - Pondering Academia

This evening I played croquet.

I didn't particularly want to play. I'd never played before that I can recall. I know the rules of the game, but it didn't seem interesting. And I wasn't particularly looking forward to it because, honestly, it seemed like an affectation. I mean, I grew up with folks who might play horseshoes or "Smear the Queer" (sorry...). I guess croquet would be alright if there were kids there or all the adults were drinking. Where I grew up, nearly any behavior is made less of an affectation if the adults are drinking. But it's also true that where I grew up, you don't diss the host, and since they wanted to play, I played.

And despite the fact that I won - largely due to how the game was played and that I was so sucky that I was able to sneak past all the players trying to do strategize around each other - the game still seems like an affectation. So, in spite of the fact that someone actually got annoyed in a game of croquet, it has me thinking.

What I'm thinking is this: I wonder what other affectations go along with academia? And maybe affectation is too strong, but there are certain behaviors that I'm thinking about that people seem to expect within the career more than outside of it. Or maybe they're assumptions. For example, wine drinking. I have no empirical evidence of this, but I'm pretty sure there are more than a few people who became wine drinkers because it seemed like what people "like us" do.

When croquet was mentioned to me before the dinner, I said, honestly, that I'd probably pass if given the choice. This was greeted as shocking. But really, it just didn't seem like something I would do.

I think there's a tendency, too, to assume that academics have traveled abroad extensively, that we all went to Europe in high school or college. I don't think I've ever been to an academic get-together yet where someone didn't drop a story about their time in Europe the first time, and almost inevitably, it came with the tone that I'd clearly been there, too. But it makes me wonder what else the "academic-us" carries with it that I'm not thinking about, and maybe, just maybe, whether this isn't somehow tied to why academia isn't working for me?