Keep it Light

Friday evening me and a bunch of the CMRS crew decided to hit our new favourite watering hole, Que Pasa, for a few 2 for 1 cocktails after a long week.  This was all well and fine and everyone was having a good time until a joke got perceived as something serious by another person who hadn't slept the night before and took it into a serious conversation about a seriously divisive issue.  Things were said, the flow of chatter became a current of argument, and in the end hasty wording combined with too many voices to the detriment of what had been a fine outing.  What was said and the abrupt departure of those it was said to could have arisen out of any such topic, and today it is a new day - wondering if there will be a sharing of drinks again, or the common room for that matter, in the happy camaraderie we had.  I am sure things will work out, but we've only got a few weeks left and it would be a shame if some people find themselves not enjoying that time for something that just happened that way.

The conversation can turn from jovial to serious in a hot minute here when everyone is under a great deal of pressure to perform and to think about things seriously and scholarly - and yet a bar is not a classroom and people don't mind how they say what they say as well as they might without that atmosphere to guide them.  My advice is: keep it light.  There are 30 some students here who have 30 backgrounds, 30 points of view, 30 ways of thinking, 30 reasons to believe what they believe - and to imagine for a second that they will always agree and will always be what everyone can decide together is perfectly right is just plain impossible.  My fiance's father once told me: when people live together, no matter how well they mean or how much they care about each other, sometimes they are going to fight.  It as true here as it is at home - but here you don't know the people around you well enough to make assumptions about why they think what they think or know when you are going to fall into a minefield during happy-hour.

So what I'll say is: try to keep it light and when you can't, when the fight that is inevitable comes up, have grace and remember that it is very unlikely that anyone intended to cause it or hurt you in it - quite the opposite in fact, no one wants these sort of disagreements to become barriers to getting along in close quarters - so apologise or accept an apology or find it in yourself to let it go if you possibly can.  Life is too short - and this program so much shorter - to let a slip of the conversation put a cloud over your stay here.

In other news:  I had another good tutorial and I might be taking a trip to Cambridge in the first week of December with my tutor and another of his student's from here.   I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of my sweetheart and the completion of this program, and yes, I know I signed up for the work but coming into 7th week it has been a sprinter's marathon and I am not the spring chicken who can pull double all nighters that I used to be ^.~ !  Now, with the end in sight, however distant it may seem at times, I am aware of how much being over here and doing this has broadened the way I think of the world and the people in it, but also shown me that no matter where I go and who I meet patterns emerge that are familiar and that gives a degree of comfort to the idea of the world being so much bigger than it was this time last year.