Passive-Agresssive Pantslessness

Or, in which I entirely alienate my only sibling.
My brother has a vendetta against pants.  As in, he spends a great deal of his waking hours in the absence of pants or a shirt, wearing only underwear.  This is irritating to me.  My response, first, was to ask him to wear more clothes.  After asking this a few times and garnering no response, I just took my pants off too.
And that's why I was sitting on the living room floor, playing Settlers of Catan, in my underwear.
The problem is, though, that I feel really self conscious when I'm not wearing pants.  When I have my legs turned at a certain angle, my hips look wider than normal and I have full view of the stretch marks that decorate the outside of my upper thighs.  It's terribly sexy.  Not that I'm trying to have sex appeal while I'm playing board games with my family, but it's nice to not be freaking out about my legs.
And my pantslessness makes no difference in my brother's pants status.
Pants status.  Pantstatus.  Pantstus.
I've been arguing with my brother more lately.  The newness of me being in Novi has worn off, and I've sided with my parents in the main conflict that they have.  He's making choices that I think he's going to regret later, and he doesn't like being told so.  I would want to stay detached, but at the same time, I care about him, and I worry.
I've been exercising more lately.  Not seeing any physical results yet, but I'm feeling stronger and I feel like I have more endurance, even if I can't run/swim any faster.  So that's a thing.  I hope that I'll be able to keep it up when I'm at camp and back in GR this summer.
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Let's talk about some issues

that I have with the whole entire universe.  Fun!

At two places on the freeway (one in Novi, I-96 Westbound, on a digital billboard, the other on US 131 Northbound, on the southern end of GR) there are billboards for Kentwood Office Furniture.  They say "Occupy this!" with a picture of an office chair between the words.
Alternately, GET A JOB, YA DAMN HIPPIES.
Needless to say it's offensive and unappealing.  I support the occupy movement, although I disagree with some of the ideas that they support, and I think the movement needs to present a more unified front.  Criticizing a movement isn't going to get you anywhere.

Secondly, TEDxGR.  Kumare.  This guy spoke at TEDxGR, and although I understand his message, I have a really hard time getting on board with it.  Basically, he acted like he was some sort of prophet, convinced a bunch of other people that he was a prophet (note: some people would call this "starting a cult") showed them how to find salvation, and told them that he was a fake so that they would realize that they had found salvation all on their own.
If I was involved in this, I would have a hard time trusting people afterwards.

Another speaker, Lz Granderson, got me thinking a lot.  His talk was about the gay agenda, and about how his gay agenda features drinking coffee in the morning and getting stuck in traffic on the way to work and going to bed at an insanely early old person time.  Teh gayz are just like you!  You should support gay marriage!
I support marriage equality.  However, I don't think that this is the right way to change minds.  Most people who actively oppose marriage equality aren't open to persuasion.   Two major huge factors in weather or not someone supports marriage equality are their age, and weather or not they know anyone personally who's gay.  If your next door neighbor is gay, and they're normal, then maybe teh gayz aren't so bad.  The majority of Americans support marriage equality, it's only a matter of time before things change, and giving a speech about the gay agenda isn't doing a whole lot to change that.

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Quote of the Month

"Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than they say about the stories and people we're quoting."
John Green

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Dix-Neuf

So I turned nineteen.  On Sunday.  It was a wild party.  I mean, it was fun.  I saw The Spring Standards in Ann Arbor, so that was pretty cool.  Nineteen looks like this.  Except that I was wearing the same dress I wore when I turned eighteen.

Eighteen looked like this.  And this and this and this.

I think these pictures show us a variety of things, like my sheer sex appeal, my tendency to wear bandanas, and my deep vanity.  Being eighteen was a lot of fun.  I went to college.  I passed drafting (GUYS, I PASSED DRAFTING) and made a million and a half squares out of cut paper.  I didn't finish NaNo.  I switched out of Furniture.  I saw the last half of the last Harry Potter movie.  I started a blog (Fifteen-Seventeen!) that I'm really proud of.  I drew a million cubes for Design Drawing.  I started a new (awesome) book.  I acquired a twitter addiction (follow me @froomla) and I got tweeted by...wait for it...@ThisAmerLife!  Let's not talk about how getting tweeted by Ira Glass is a high point of my year.

Thanks for coming along for the ride, guys.  It's been fun.

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SO.

I am at home!  Still!  And by home, I mean the library, which is my childhood home, where I once basked in the glory of books and 1960's architecture.  And then they let me do graffiti inside the building until I got crazy dizzy from all the fumes and they bulldozed the building.
It was a fun time.
I'm writing this book, you see, and I'm actually going to edit it and let other people read it and send it to agents for YEARS and try to get some publisher to read it and put it inside bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble.  So this book, unlike all the other things that I've written in my illustrious carrear, feels very big.  This one matters.  This isn't for fun.  I'm so unaccustomed to writing being an activity where there is pressure involved.  Writing is what you do when you need to get away from the pressure and tell stupid stories.  So.  Um.  Or maybe I'll self publish, and languish at the seven thousandth spot on the Kindle bestseller list.  I think that means that you have sold three books.  I'm not sure if I know three people who would want to buy my book.  I've never actually, like, purchased an ebook.  I don't know how that works.
AND THEN I found twenty dollars.

I need to practice some more industrial design drawing business.  BLAG.

I need to get back to work.

I'm working on the whole "Eating things that are good" thing with my family.  Because eating alone kind of freaks me out.

I need to send an email today.  Deep breaths.

I miss roommateboyfriend.

My birthday is four days away and I don't know what to do about it.  Nineteen feels very strange.  All I can think of is the epilogue, which barely even relates.  Any cool and funny things about being nineteen?  No?
I see.

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