Ads, No Thank You

(It's been a long time since I posted. Moving apartments and the awful heat threw all my habits off the rails and it's taken me a while to get back into the swing of things.) 1When I was a teenager, I read a book called The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashjian. It's a YA book published in 2001 about a very smart teenager who anonymously runs a website and blogs about anti-consumerism and his dealing with threats against (and then loss of) his anonymity1. It's one of the few books I read as a teenager that had a big impact on me. Some of Larry's thoughts on brands and advertisements have stuck with me, and I still avoid wearing clothes with brands on them. As Larry said, I'm not a billboard for advertisements. 2Most of my childhood and youth my family was poor. Sometimes very poor. I'm still learning about and recognizing just how poor my family was at times, because my mom was so good a disguising our poverty to protect us. For example, I realized just this year (and I'm in my…