fish out of water

Growing up, I spent the bulk of the summer -- which in practice was most of the year -- in water of some sort. We played a game called (for reasons unclear to me) 'Marco Polo', which was a kind of water-logged blind man's bluff. The person who was 'it' had to keep his/her eyes closed, and call out Marco. Those playing the game called back Polo, giving the seeker some indication of where in the pool they might be. If the seeker thought someone had hopped out of the pool and was moving about on dry land, they called out fish out of water, and those on land had to jump back in (thus giving away their locations).

Well, this past week I was fish out of water at a conference outside my discipline. There were a few people whose names I knew from their work, and a few I knew through one person or another. But it wasn't that kind of thick web of connections and reputations and citations one knows and feels (or, as a graduate student, aspires to know and feel) in one's own discipline.

But the most important lesson I took away from the event was that surly grad students can be found everywhere. I knew this in theory, and I certainly experience a certain surliness among my peers from time to time, but it was an interesting thing to observe a graduate student clique to which I had no aspirations of belonging and from which exclusion meant little. What surliness! What insecurity! What inability or unwillingness to engage with strangers!

There have been times when I have felt myself behaving like this with my colleagues at my home institution, and it has bothered me. Watching this clique, though, I felt a strange kind of dispassionate sympathy. Either I was a threat (it seemed) or I wasn't worth talking to. In actuality, I posed about as much threat as a blueberry muffin, and I didn't much care whether they talked to me or not.

The only thing I felt sorry for was that I couldn't easily convey any of this. But I stored these observations away in my head. I hope I can still find them when it's time to leave the field.