Hallowhat?

Sometimes I really don't know what to write on here. Some days my thoughts are super boring, even to me, and it's exhausting to even imagine the drudgery involved in typing them out. But today, you lucky bastards, I woke up and thought, 'Hey! Everyone really needs to know what I think about Halloween!'

I don't really get Halloween. When I was little we didn't dress up or go trick-or-treating, so I don't have any 'Oooh, Halloween is super fun and my kids will shrivel up and die if they don't have the perfect costume and get a huge bag of candy!' angst that I project on them. One year when I was almost too old for trick or treating, I went out with my cousins, just because I had never done it. It really wasn't that fun. An old lady answered the door at one house with a notebook and took down everyone's name; maybe she thought she was Santa's henchwoman. Or maybe she actually was. In any event, that was my first experience with developing a false identity on the fly, although, sadly, not the last.

It sure seems like a lot of effort just to end up with a bag of candy. If you really want the candy, you could just buy the candy you want, sparing yourself the disappointment of having to paw through those crappy Laffy Taffies and Tootsie Rolls so you can get to the small handful of Hershey's Dark mini-bars and Smarties. Then what do you do with the lousy candy? Throw it away? There's starving children in Africa, man! Your leftover Tootsie Rolls could feed a family of seventeen for a week; if only they could have your cast-off sugar high and tooth decay. So, see? Wasteful.

We live in an apartment building with somewhere around a hundred apartments and at least twelve thousand kids, so trick or treating is a huge deal. The BX shovels the big bags of fun-size candy onto the sales floor with a dump truck, for real. Okay, fine, not really, but they totally should because it would save them a ton of work. This year, we are having a 'neighborhood' party with some of our hall-mates. Shane will be either Spiderman or Buzz Lightyear, and Weston is going to be a Deinonychus in a costume fashioned from a 12-24 month dragon Old Navy dragon costume and a thrift store Juicy Couture sweat suit. I had hoped to incorporate my growing supply of dryer lint, but Weston isn't as easy to fool as he once was. Fortunately, I have found a great use for the lint, you can check it out here. Don't worry, though, if you are coming to our Halloween party, you won't HAVE to donate your candy to starving children or play with lint from my dryer. But you totally can.