I was chatting on Google Hangouts a few weeks ago with my two best friends and revisiting last month’s BBQ birthday party. It’s not often I have people in the same space from all my social worlds. I have my “non-parent” friends, the friends that I made a decade and a half ago when I moved to L.A., and then I have my “parent friends”, the friends I’ve made since moving to Brooklyn. Of those two sources, the latter are overwhelmingly “Scout people”: the community built through what was original “5th Brooklyn Scouts” and is now the “718 Rovers”. My two besties, who pre-date all my parent status, therefore find some amusement in watching me interact with the other Rovers, because they knew me before this round of Scout nerdiness entered my life.
It was in recanting this Hangouts anecdote that I quoted the use of inside jokes as part of this new village we’ve built in Brooklyn. There are a lot of inside jokes with the rest of the Rovers; you don’t work together for five years without building up a lot of shared references. At my birthday event, I was describing my experience volunteering at the Bed-Stuy YMCA and how the most popular skit I taught was Invisible Bench, and everyone yelled “INVISIBLE BENCH!” and immediately attempted to call their kids over to demonstrate it even though we were laughing too hard to call effectively. “Invisible Bench” is a running gag in our group, along with a couple other popular skits, just for being the skit that our kids irrationally love to perform every single camp. It’s one of many inside jokes, but it was one of the strongest moments of nerdy hilarity I remember from the party.
Realizing that we have these kind of shared references, inside jokes and a common language of anecdote though made me suddenly see my Scout people community in a way I hadn’t before. In college, I was part of the Arts Undergrad Society, the council of students that volunteered to run the Faculty of Arts. It was where I made my friends. It was where I spent my time. It was how I identified myself, I am part of the AUS. We ran not only the Faculty but also spent the year building up to Arts County Fair, the end of year charity one-day music festival, which, by the time I graduated, was a 16,000 attendee event with two stages, rock and dance. Because we spent so much time working together on ACF, we all shared a set of inside jokes and references in addition to our common working goals and status as students at UBC. (In fact, as I recall, we documented those inside jokes in a running list of quotes throughout the school year.)
It was the phrase “inside jokes” that made me suddenly see the parallels between my college community and my Brooklyn one. In both cases, it is a community of overachievers who have wholeheartedly committed to a goal in a way that is very pure of heart. In both cases, these are communities of people who simply wish to do good, while also prioritizing the building of friendships and a social experience in the process. In both cases, there are a lot of liberal arts nerds involved.
Basically, I identify strongly with anything where a montage set to “We Built This City (On Rock And Roll)” can be created, whether that’s an ACF setup or the 2018 Moot. If there’s several hours of literally building something with actual labour to be done, then it needs a montage like the Muppets:
I feel it’s important for me to realize this. I gravitate to communities of nerdy overachievers! These are my people! This is also who I am! I am an over-committed do-gooder at heart, but I am happiest to do so if I can throw in a certain amount of goofiness with my earnestness. It is a very Muppet approach, but it also means I approach my work and my effort in Scouting with a certain amount of open-heartedness that keeps it joyful.
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