God, I suck at updating this thing. When I started it I was hoping for internet fame like some of the more popular blogs that I follow, but thing is, they update regularly and have a pretty solid following. Also, they have pictures, and mine has none. Oh woe is me, I will never scale the ladder of internet fame!
But anyway, a new post! Huzzah! So the latest installment of blog posts about the people I'm fond of (which started with a story about one of my best friends conning me as a small child) is going to kind of cover my little brother. The thing is, my little brother, who is 17 years old and not normal in any sense of the word, is like most beautiful and important things in this world. Just as you cannot define the truly important things in life like love, justice, and beauty in words without somehow cheapening the deeply personal connotation each individual human carries with them deep against their soul, you cannot define or really describe my little brother and do his person justice. I just reread that, and while it conveys the thought I want, it's really long winded, so let me rephrase. You cannot set a definition to a word without excluding all of the other possible definitions, and while that is perfectly fine for words like "banana" and "platypus," it'll hardly do for those abstract words that we use to describe the really important parts of our lives. And the same principle applies to Paul, my younger brother. So this blog will probably have a series of posts about him, and eventually I might paint a picture of him that comes close to the reality, but for now, just giggle and try not to judge too much.
So I'll tell you about the thighs. Yes, thighs. I really wish I had a picture I could show you of him doing this, but Paul's got some sort of strange sixth sense about when anything with recording capacities turns on. One minute he'll be stalking through the kitchen making velociraptor noises, and then someone will turn on a camera upstairs behind a closed door and he'll stop.
THIGHS! is kind of my brother's battle cry, and weird as it sounds, it evolved from SCKREEE! but before I get there, I have to explain something about Paul. He's brilliant, hands down the smartest person I know, but he is also lazy as all fuck. I don't know if "lazy" is really the right word, but Paul will do absolutely nothing without coercion or bribery unless he "sees the point." And that point almost always has to be entertainment value. If it's not fun, he will not do it unless someone is bribing him, threatening him, or physically moving his body for him. This applies to homework (he surprisingly doesn't have a problem with school) and chores mostly, and while he's figured out how to really dig his heels in about homework, he's developed an evolving defense mechanism to avoid taking out the trash, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, and etc.
When I was his age, so he would have been in middle school, whenever we asked him to do anything, Paul would pretend to become a velociraptor. He'd get up on his toes and stalk around like the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, which was pretty amusing, but didn't impede our ability to talk to him. He solved this problem by screaming SCKREEE! every time we opened our mouths, which was funny the first couple of times. Until, of course, we got fed up and just covered his mouth. It's hard to scream like a velociraptor with two hands over your mouth, but he'd try it anyway.
From this dinosaur phase, though, he developed a kind of disturbing way of walking. He'll get up on his toes and skitter around with his legs bowed. If you've ever seen those mating dances that crabs do on their hind legs, it kind of looks like that, but giant. He's a buck ten after eating a Thanksgiving turkey by himself, but he's also pushing 6 feet now, so he looks like this but without a suit because he'd never change out of his pajama pants (that are too short, by the way) if he didn't have to. So picture the Slender Man doing a crab dance with bowed legs, and you've got a pretty good idea of how Paul likes to walk around the house.
I mentioned the pajama pants, right? Remember them, they're important to THIGHS! because jeans just don't cut it for this. Anyway, Paul typically doesn't wear anything beyond pajama pants that don't go past his ankles, which is how this whole thing started. He's damn skinny, almost to the point that we're afraid if he walks past an open window someone will call child services. Not to mention that he's Edward Cullen pale, and hunches like this guy (just showed that picture to Paul, telling him I found a really good picture of him on the internet. He didn't think I was funny), so he looks pretty freaking strange to begin with. The high-water pajama pants are really just icing on the weird ass cake, because he's funny looking all on his own. But he won't get pants that fit, since he hates clothes shopping and inherited my father's deep rooted fear of change. We used to tease him about it, asking if a pipe had burst in his room, and after Japan's tsunami we started asking if he was planning a vacation (my family is made entirely of assholes).
His response, god help us all, became to pull his pajama pants up as high as possible, like Urkel. When that became old hat, he started grabbing his pants at the ankles and pulling them up so high that it looks like he's wearing a flannel diaper.
Picture this: the Slender Man in a flannel diaper and nothing else hunched like Quasimoto and pale as death. Now make him skitter.
If I've done my job right, you just wet yourself with laughter, because that is almost always the reaction he gets when he does this. It is so effective at crippling the entire family with laughter, that he'll squint and whisper "THIGHS" and we break into hysterics just thinking about it. The word has become a threat, so conversations go like this:
"Paul, take out the trash"
"Thighs"
"Grurk (that's the sound of someone choking on their own laughter). Paul, I'm not asking again."
"THIGHS"
"Paul, don't!"
"THIGHS!" and then the pants are up and he's skittering away. I'm laughing just thinking about it.
