ON HALLOWEEN (AGAIN)

I used to love Halloween, with the exception of the time I wrote about last year. Getting older, however, has sucked much of the fun out of it for me.

SPOOKY STUFF - I've never been a spooky kind of guy. As a kid, I was absolutely TERRIFIED of "Large Marge" in the movie Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, so I never graduated to the Friday the 13ths, the Nightmare on Elm Streets, or the, uh, Halloweens. I can handle It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, but that's about it. [Yet I love Stephen King's books. Weird.]

CANDY - Let me get this out in the open: I would eat nothing but candy if I could. I just stared at the keyboard for fifteen minutes trying to figure out what my favorite candy bar is, and I couldn't come to a solution. So naturally, as candy was a large part of the Halloween experience, you'd think I'd still be all for it. Nope. I know that I have an appetite that has trouble limiting portions...so eating one candy bar often leads to eating MANY candy bars, which leads to weight gain, guilt gain, and diabetes gain. So I've cut the candy out of Halloween. I hate getting old.

COSTUMES - I have also never been a big dress-up kind of Halloweener. As a kid, my costumes weren't excessively elaborate - I just threw on a Joe Montana jersey and called myself a football player. In middle school, I threw on a hockey jersey (despite my lack of hockey-related skill or experience...or ice skating know-how, for that matter) and called that a costume. So the dressing-up part of Halloween doesn't appeal to me. And yes, I enjoy the prospect of attractive women dressing up in revealing clothing as much as (or more than) the next guy, but working with college students makes me feel very parental to many of them. It's to the point where I want to stop them before they leave the building and make them go put on a jacket or something.

EVIL - Well, I'll still have a devil's seance ouija party in the cemetery and summon some Lovecraftian monstrosity tomorrow. It is Halloween, after all.