304 – Halloween (the holiday)

Halloween. What a day. There’s something for everyone. Free candy for the kids (though I wouldn’t mind some free candy now), skimpy costumes for the hormonal ages, and free candy for the adults (your kids won’t be able to eat all those treats). It is a fun day. A scary day. An alternatingly fun and scary day. And it used to be my favorite holiday.

I say “used to” because my relationship with October 31st is a little strained these days. I’m at a place in my life where the debauched festivities of Halloween don’t interest me as much as they could or should. Don’t get me wrong – I love the day and fully support it, but I’m just not that interested in getting so drunk I can’t see.

It wasn’t always this way. A few years back I was really into the drinking and the partying. I remember (kind of) one Halloween in college. I was dressed as Steve Prefontaine – a costume no one understood or cared about. I had a great night going from party to party, embarrassing myself and putting pumpkins on things that ought not to have pumpkins on them. And then I don’t quite know what happened. What I do know is that I had to wake up for two midterms the following day – one in Sociology and one in Chemistry. Aced one, barely passed the other. Story of my college career.

A different kind of school is to blame for my decreased interest in the final day of Oct-horror-ber. Working at the unnamed high school has been a huge roadblock in having a good time, as I had to wake up before 6 am the mornings after Halloweens 2011-2013. Luckily tomorrow is Saturday, but I had to wake up just as early today. I won’t make it that late.

There was a time when days of the week and school didn’t matter. As a child Halloween was the best. I used to have dreams in July about my favorite holiday. But it wasn’t Christmas I was dreaming about (partially because I’m Jewish). Ryan Ganley and I would spend what felt like hours going from house to house in makeshift costumes, shoving as much candy as we could in our pillowcases. I would give the Almond Joys to my mom, and then demolish the rest over a week or two. These are the kind of childhood memories that you can never recapture. But they are always there in your mind, ripe for cherishing.

And who knows – maybe it’s not too late to make new memories. For instance this might go down forever as the year I saw Re-Animator The Musical, or the year 10 cops spent half an hour investigating an empty bus parked outside of my apartment. Sure, I may not be interested in bar-hopping on the Westside (ugh, the Westside), but there are other ways to celebrate. Perhaps my relationship with Halloween isn’t as strained as I thought. It could just be maturing. Much like we all must.