In Search of Expertise

One of the initial hang-ups in starting this blog was our self-proclaimed lack of knowledge on any one subject, which we felt put us at a disadvantage. What could we possibly sustain a dialogue about given how little we know about anything? We got around this by gearing towards discovery and exploration, but we realized something in coming to this conclusion: everyone knows a substantial amount of at least one subject. Thus began our respective searches for an expert, and here’s what we found:

Diana (Harrogate, North Yorkshire): I found about as big of an expert as I am going to find on the NFL draft. He’s watched the draft live every year for the last 12 years of his life. Given our time difference here in the UK, my expert had to take leave to watch the draft live. The draft has been kind of the topic of the last week here on base, but my expert just kind of stood out because he was the one who was the most dedicated to it. Again, he took one of his annual 30 days of military leave off for this! The draft happens over three days starting with the best picks first and then moving on to the rest of the players who are left over. The one that everyone is talking about this year, though it wasn’t exactly surprising, is the release of quarterback Tim Tebow from NY Jets. Tebow was, of course, the star quarterback for the University of Florida, but his skills haven’t exactly transferred into the NFL. So after three years in the NFL, Tebow is not doing great, which is weird considering our own quarterback from UGA, Matt Stafford, is doing fairly well in the NFL.

Elsa (Brooklyn, NY): I found my expert in a roundabout way. At first I tried going up to people and asking them “What are you an expert at?” As it turns out, they had the same reservations we did with calling themselves experts, so I had to approach the issue at a slant. I changed the question to, “About which subject do you love talking and don’t get asked enough?” This yielded much better results. When I asked my roommate Geoff this question, he immediately identified “movies, books, and video games set in post-apocalyptic worlds” as his topic of choice. Per Geoff, the appeal in these stories comes from watching a person get their primal reset button pushed. When commodities are scarce, people’s desire to survive gets tested in a way that you or I could only vaguely imagine. Given the level of passiveness in our day-to-day survival, the contrast in their active effort to stay alive triggers an emotional response. We root for these people; we want them to succeed regardless of how bleak that success actually looks. And the visually bleak aesthetic serves a purpose too. Geoff mentioned the pervasive use of fire-related imagery in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which works most effectively precisely because of the contrasting backdrop. Geoff considers himself an optimist, so the idea that fire served as a stand-in for hope really resonated with him. And in the end, it’s absolutely a visual representation of the internal struggle. 

Diana: I learned about a lot of stuff. Honestly sports is not my thing but like he pointed out it is current affairs. We just had our “boards” for some of our best enlisted people where we grill them over current affairs, leadership situations, and history. One of the categories under current affairs is sports. It was the second thing on there, in fact. The funniest to me was a guy who tried to argue the question and said it was a complete and total lie. I don’t know if you saw the finals for college basketball but there was a guy who broke his leg in the worst way possible. Kevin Ware. The question was “Do you think Kevin Ware’s gruesome injury contributed to his team’s win?” The guy said that team did not win. The room went silent. I laughed. I think I just laugh at too many things that I probably shouldn’t, but anyways, sports are followed by a lot of people. I’ve read that even President Obama is usually flying on AF One with ESPN on in the background instead of some news network. Of course, now it’s an event that ESPN and sports buffs are all over but it wasn’t like that before. It’s been one of those things that has been hyped up by 24/7 tv coverage. They, of course, have scrolls on ESPN but those actually make more sense to me than the ones on CNN but because at least the ones on ESPN tell you the different scores of different sports and teams and such.

Elsa:  I really enjoyed talking to my expert as well. We talked about a couple more of his favorite uses of the trope (Fallout and Mad Max), but what really caught my attention was the idea that desolation can turn transience on its head. For example, I come in contact with a tremendous number of people every day. That’s not to say that we interact, but there are a lot of us moving around past each other trying to go about our day without too much disruption. Now can you imagine how that attitude would change if the number of people dropped so drastically that your interactions totaled, say,  one per week if you’re lucky? A desolate world necessarily implies a higher value on interactions; it implies that the default would not be to take each other for granted. If interactions become scarce and connections hard to come by, each one seems worth more somehow.