Identity Breakdowns Come In Threes, or, I Relate More To Howie Than I Expected
I’ve found myself heavily influenced by The Mezzanine, more than I would care to admit. It has taken qualities intrinsic to my identity and picked them apart, scrutinizing every detail.
I am a tangential person. I am easily distracted, and love taking any new idea and putting my own spin on it. I go from subject to subject in the blink of an eye, making connections, usually for the sake of humor. And so when I read this book, I can understand. I follow the path taken from knobs to ties to Thanksgiving to fatherly bonding; it is laid out for me, clear as day. Sometimes I’ll make sharp turns in conversation, and then back up and lay out the path that took me there. I used to spell everything out as a child. Now that I’m older, the group of friends I have seems to generally understand the leaps I make, which I am grateful for.
But I am also a surface-level person. My brain runs a million miles a minute. I have at least five things going on at all times, and as such, I don’t delve deeper than I need to in most things. But I have tied my shoes five times in the time of reading this book and have thought about Howie every time. I have never had a shoelace snap in my almost-16 years of life, but I wear tennis shoes daily as opposed to business dress shoes. It’s strange for me to even think about shoelaces this much, but the periodicity of shoelaces has increased from 0 now to 6 for me, and goes up every time we have class.
I am someone who loves internal debates. I, too, have considered the merits of hand dryers to a great length, weighing the saved paper material against the many seconds of hot air blown after I walk away. At a younger age, I came to the conclusion that air-drying was the most energy-efficient, or I would dry my hands on my shirt. But I am aware now that it’s difficult to open doors with wet hands, and I don’t enjoy having water stains on my clothing. Air drying does actually work quite well for me if the door pushes outwards, though. I simply swing my hands back and forth and my hands are dry relatively quickly. So, I suppose, that is still the winner in my book, though I use paper towels more often than not.
I really like your blog post and I too am affect more than I want to admit by the Mezzanine. I think the internal debates that I have are fun and relate well to the book as well as your thoughts. I find the way that Howie thinks somewhat follow-able like you said but it does seem like so many different things woven together. I totally think your point about jumping from topic to topic is true and relatable in the book. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you mention the topic of "internal debates"--it can sometimes seem like Howie's rants are directed toward a reader, like he's trying to convince us of something, or get us to agree with him, or at least to affirm that what he is ranting about is indeed "madness." And we note how he seems to keep a lot of this stuff to himself--we don't get the sense of him constantly walking around the office trying to talk to everyone about staplers. It really does seem like a lot of the "fun" for him as narrator/author, or his compulsion to write this book at all, is to unleash some of these rants he's been holding on to for years. There's an "I've always wanted to sound off on this topic!" tone to a lot of the novel. But they often seem like debates for the sake of debates, for the intellectual exercise of an "internal debate," and Howie is often open to reconsidering his position, or to see certain topics in another light--as if he is anticipating a possible reader's response or objection.
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