Halloween, or, Being a Goofball and Getting Away With It

I'm antsy with excitement about the weekend ahead. My pal H arrives this afternoon for a weekend that includes a fun dinner tonight, some rallying tomorrow, and a little Halloween gathering tomorrow night. We decided to launch a local pub crawl from our apartment, which gave me a great excuse to break out the boxes of decorations I've had since those legendary college Halloween parties we started throwing in 1997.

Take these spooky candelabras, for instance, which had a few timeout years back in the day due to their fire hazard potential during raucous flip cup matches. Adult apartment with nice furnishings in a prohibitively expensive and therefore small space = no flip cup! Although there's always the patio...

There will be decidedly less beer this time around, and I'm skipping fake spiderwebs everywhere, too. Just a small little crowd taking in the local scene. Fanny has contempt for this approach, by the way. As a Halloween kitten she thinks we should go big or go home. I remind her it's not college anymore. Hell, it's not even graduate school anymore.

Since I'm way, way, way olderwiser  now, I know enough to prevent the rookie mistake of eating all the Halloween candy before guests arrive. This is why I not only refuse to open any bags of candy until Saturday, I've even hidden them from myself (and umm... will hopefully remember said hiding place tomorrow). Speaking of the rookie days, here's a treasure - the dreaded costume box, forced upon anyone who dared show up sans costume. This collection is pretty finely tuned, actually - consisting of a few basic things I bought during Year 1 and growing annually with the props that drunken partiers left behind at our place.

Oh, and my "Michael's bag of crazy" costume? I left a hint for you in one of these pictures. Let's just say I'll be straddling the very thin line between "abstract artistic expression" and "hot mess." In a feminist- and conservative-approved manner, of course.

Go get after it this weekend, everyone. After all, laughing at ourselves is the best kind of laughter.