Howie’s Adulting 101

For my first blogpost, I would like to partially unravel and contemplate Howie’s instant and complete change into an adult! Howie understands that the trivialities of life which seem to have no importance, are actually what consume most of our daily thoughts. Howie also has a childlike outlook on life: contemplating or getting excited about every small instance and relating it back to his childhood! Is it not Howie’s transformative childhood thoughts that created his adult-self? Although Howie may now view these thoughts as commonplace from an adult perspective, he of all people should understand that these thoughts cannot all of a sudden become trivial. You cannot simply stop recognizing important pieces of you! Won’t these pieces of you subconsciously appear in your head, and introduce themselves in bouts of nostalgia, even in adulthood? How can a person decide with such certainty, that they are officially an adult? I have never been an adult before, but I figure that adulting is a never-ending process. New transformative thoughts do not replace old ones, they simply stack on top of the old thoughts, giving a person a richer understanding of life! I find it uncharacteristic of Howie to suddenly deem all of his childhood thoughts, at the age of 23, insignificant and commonplace, when most of the Mezzanine, is built off of Howie’s childhood discoveries tied to his adult life. How can one’s graduation into adulthood stem from one particular moment? 

Howie believes that somehow, these new “adult” thoughts will never “decompose” as his childhood thoughts had. I agree that as you grow up, you may have more knowledge in certain areas, like in tying your shoes or wearing deodorant. I also agree that as you gain a fuller perspective on life, small childhood moments may begin to seem more trivial. I don’t think Howie is directly saying that all of his childhood moments will be henceforth, nonexistent (that’s impossible). But he treats this graduation into adulthood like the start of a completely new life, which to me, is unreasonable, because life is one long extent of time. In fact, The Mezzanine depicts life (moments of life), as one long extent of time! Childhood thoughts coagulate into better, more constructive thoughts later in life, they don’t all together become unimportant one day. That’s like after 23 years of slowly building a skyscraper, I suddenly decide that the foundation of that skyscraper is too simple, so I go and tear up the foundation from underneath the building! Wouldn’t the skyscraper cease to exist if I did that? 

To be fair, perhaps Howie was trying to state that the aura tied to an object/experience from childhood, like drinking milk for example, changed as he grew. Certain experiences no longer held the same meaning in his adult-life as they did in his childhood life. In that case, there is a flaw in his statement that thoughts ``decompose”. They don’t decompose, they just become altered. Although if thoughts and feelings can change, then there is also a flaw in my skyscraper analogy; Humans are dynamic, whereas skyscrapers are not, and the foundation of a skyscraper cannot change once it has been built. However, while a skyscraper cannot change from the bottom, it can always grow taller. So why is it that Howie believes childhood thoughts can “decompose” or change, while adult thoughts cannot?