Monday, January 23, 2012

A Series On Growing Up


This is a series of posts that’s not specifically about the kids, per se, but definitely involves them from a cause and effect perspective in a lot of ways.

I’ve noticed for a while now that I’ve adopted several behaviors that fall into the following two categories:
  • Things my parents did when I was growing up
  • Things I didn’t understand why my parents, or any adult, would ever do until recently
I turn 30 this month so it seemed like a good time to take a look back at the last 10 years or so and examine how these behaviors came to be. My initial reaction was that I was just becoming more like my parents over time. (Or, probably more accurately put: I have always been like my parents and over the last decade of my life have finally been comfortable just being myself and those traits I happen to have in common with my parents naturally came to the surface.) Some of these are very specific to my family; like my temper or my inability to make a decision when it comes to things like where we should eat dinner or what movie we should watch. But a lot of them are behaviors I had always noticed adults doing as I was growing up and wondered (mostly) to myself “what is wrong with them?” When you're younger, pretty much every adult that you see looks and acts like the kid everyone makes fun of in school. We all promised ourselves we wouldn't turn into that, but slowly and surely I am becoming that person.

How I look to younger people. But, you know, with less hair.
Any time I see a behavior that I don’t understand, I REALLY want to know more about it. And if that behavior is also one that I exhibit then I REALLY, REALLY want to know more about it. I don’t like not knowing why things happen, in general, and I especially don’t like not knowing why I do (or don’t do) something. I’ve been thinking recently about these adult behaviors I’ve seemed to adopt and tried to retrace the steps to find out where they came from. A sort of forensic review of my path to lameness. I really want to be able to point to this series of posts one day when 13 year old Patrick or Madelyn asks how I got to be so lame. I can just pull this up and say "Here is exactly how. Step by step. And you will too."

So, over the next three days, I'll pick a specific behavior each day and dig in to how I used to act, how I act now and what I think got me there. Here are the three I'll be looking at:
  • Music (alternate title - "Kids today listen to crap!…and so do I…") - wherein you'll find that I actually kind of like a couple Katy Perry songs and have redefined "cutting edge" as being the first one to hear an Adele song on Star 94.
  • Food (alternate title - "This broccoli tastes great! Wait, where did my life go wrong?") - wherein you'll discover that even with my weakening taste buds and lower food standards, I still hold asparagus to be the most horrible thing to eat on earth.
  • Clothes/Movies/Culture (alternate title - "Of course I can wear these jean shorts, they still fit. What? They're not cool anymore? Oh, they were NEVER cool? Huh.") - wherein you will discover the last time I bought clothes for anyone over three feet tall was years ago and I'm still convinced my cargo pants have some life left in them.
This will probably be a constantly changing list and I’m sure I’ll revisit it again in the future to update with more odd behaviors explained. Make sure to check back every day this week to read all the posts. I'll wrap it up on Friday once we're on the other side of this and see if I'm any better for it. Or just more depressed. I suppose I won't know till we get there. See ya tomorrow!

1 comment:

KBBean said...

This is going to be good! ...and will probably make me feel reeeeeaaaallllyyy old.