"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?

Of midterms and post-partum digressions...

And so life does away with looking on the bright side.

Midterms are here and one of my students in a research methods class sent me this question about their most recent assignment (a critique of a scholarly journal article):

also, the methodology.. would an example of that be something like a textual analysis??

For those of you not in the know, I have determined the double question mark signals that a question is being asked that will make you want to actually drink a bleach and tonic. Then my sister called to complain about how my mother had ruined the birth of my grand niece by wanting to be in the room and jockeying for position during the birth. The quite-heated conversation actually went on for over two hours on two separate evenings, forcing me to ask the following:

did you see the birth?
did mom see the birth?
so you're upset and screaming because someone touched you?

Let's ignore for a moment why in the world my entire family actually wanted to be in the room ( I know, I know, beautiful experience...miracle of life...but honestly, if I ever have a kid, we'll not be serving potato salad and having a reunion in the birthing suite) - evidently births are now stadium events. What is most frustrating is the fact that in all of these conversations, no one actually managed to tell me anything about the baby herself. Through my superior deductive reasoning (and the ability to ask a question in the time it takes a rabid relative to draw a breath between incoherent spewage) I have since learned that the child has hair and a flat nose.

I might be grand-uncle to a pug named Antoinette.

I'm consoling myself with the knowledge that other people's families are also absolutely insane and might also miss the point of a birth in such an utterly insane manner.