Inter-Disciplinary Conversation: Some Advice

The parity between Monday and Wednesday post is becomes more and more palpable as the weeks go by. Maybe I'm just struggling for ideas at the moment or, even worse, maybe I've lost it all together. The truth of the matter is that they have always been pretty close together anyway and maybe it's time that I dropped the distinction that I've been clinging onto with my fingertips for so long now. The reason why I open with this is because my post for today is literally just talking about my position in the world. I write about that kind of thing most weeks and because there is a mention of the word 'world' in there I suppose that's why I've kept the distinction between Monday and Wednesday going. Anyway I'll get on with it now. Today's post is about something that I started to notice when I came to university which has now grown and developed into something that I feel defines a part of someone's personality. This, my friends, is where society breaks up.

Never sit right at the back of a lecture that has potential to be boring unless you want to devise blog posts in your head. There I was minding my own business as the lecture started to the noise of feedback from the lecturer's microphone - 'everyone awake after that?' didn't think so. The first 10 minutes is not bad; opens up to having potential for being interesting. Another 20 minutes later and I'm into zone-out mode - not a cool place to be. I did manage to come up with this blog post but I subsequently didn't have a clue what the guy was saying for the remaining 20 minutes - Jurisprudence and I don't get along very well at the best of times. In that time of non-concentration, I started to think about something that had popped into my head a while ago: that we all live in our own little worlds. What I mean by that is that we all have our own subjects/jobs/school things that we do that nobody else really knows anything about except the people that also do them. I'll use myself as an example: I'm a law student and I used to try and talk to non-law students about what I was doing in my classes - they tried to care but ultimately they got bored.

It works both ways of course because, unless it's something you have a particular knowledge of, you are never going to be as interested in what someone else is talking about as they are. I could easily go home this weekend and spout off everything that I've learned in the last 5 days with a fair degree of ease but I don't think my parents would really get any of it. They love that I'm enthusiastic about it all but they don't love talking about it. I suppose it boils down to the fact that it looks like I'm showing off but I'm really not. I'm so used to being able to talk about my course with people that I'm doing it with, saying things that, in reality, only a law student would understand. I did this quite a lot of the time when I went home at the very start of university but now I've taken to boiling it down to the basics: subject name, course work due (e.g. essay), how hard/easy I'm finding it. If I was to go home on Friday and tell my parents that this week I handed in an essay about the free movement of goods and measures that are equivalent to quantitative restrictions for EU Law then they would look at me as though I've gone mad. Plus I like to go home and talk about everything else other than the law - it's a nice retreat/way to reset.

My advice to people that find themselves boring their friends with spiels about their favourite part of the course is to find common ground between what they are doing and what they other person does. I guess that is the essence of the thing we all call conversation. If you can't find common ground then at least find the smallest bit of knowledge you have about the subject that the other person is doing and ask them about it. I guess that is the essence of what we all call learning. All I'm trying to say is that, in society, there are groups of people created by the discipline that they have committed themselves to. It doesn't mean that people can't get along because we all often have the common interest of not talking about work or education. My topic of choice is football and always will be. Discuss.

Thanks for reading and it's nice to finally put out bulky post for you all to devour,

Martin