Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween. We need a lot more holidays that allow people to dress in costume and eat an entire bag of Reese’s cups. Seriously, just think about how much better Valentine’s Day would be if you could buy yourself a box of chocolates while being an imperial stormtrooper.

I squandered a few Halloweens in my childhood by wearing the same fairy princess dress for multiple years in a row, thus forever missing my chance to be baby Yoda. Since then, I’ve learned to show greater respect for the idols of my formative years.

[Important Update: It has come to my attention that some people think the creature pictured above is Cookie Monster. If you missed this important part of Sesame Street, I feel really bad for you.]

In addition to dressing up and sugar, I also love being good at things, which is why I rarely go dancing. However, one of the community centers in town has swing dancing every Tuesday night, and my roommate convinces me to come roughly once per year for the Halloween costume contest. A little coordination-based loss of dignity is a fair price to pay for dancing with the Dread Pirate Roberts and Dr. Horrible.

This year I couldn’t settle on an appropriate nerd culture role model, so I wore this:

I received a couple of compliments and only one “You look like you’re twelve,” but I just joined the contest for the fun of it. My outfit could never compete on the level of the guy who built a Transformer suit out of spare car parts.

But to my intense surprise, when they started announcing the winners, I had come in first!

In the children’s category.

Specificity was clearly not this contest’s top priority, though. Other winners, as announced from the stage, included:

“The robot”

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“The Fantastiks”

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…and finally, “The Star Trek dude.”

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I asked Jean-Luc how he felt about being demoted from Captain to “dude.” Apparently it’s a little like dressing as food and being mistaken for a middle-schooler.

Picard did dance with me, though. My level of excitement was probably sufficient to put me on some kind of watch list for deranged stalkers of fictional characters. I elected not to mention my own tenure on the Enterprise.

Have Some Candy

I might be the teensiest bit anal retentive.

I work at the front desk in my office, which puts me in charge of the candy jar. I have plenty of prior training for this job responsibility, thanks to my lifelong social skills compensation technique of offering people sweets as an inducement to like me.


I am also thoroughly provisioned because the nearby yuppie grocery store sells saltwater taffy in individual bins, so I can count out an equal number of each flavor.

It’s important to ensure proper flavor distribution in the jar, so I sort out all the taffy into little piles on the desk and then layer them in. One of my coworkers caught me in the middle of this process last week.





You can’t let all the strawberry ones end up on the bottom.

Come to think of it, this compulsion toward order is probably behind my inability to appreciate the “shuffle” feature of my MP3 player.

When I finally get tired of listening to the Muppet Movie album on repeat, shuffle always sounds like a great option. But then every song that plays reminds me of two or three more I want to hear. The buildup of music options is compounded by uncertainty: With 8 gigs of music, it could be weeks before I get around to “Uptown Girl.” Worse yet, what if I change my settings in a moment of weakness and disrupt the shuffle cycle? Then it’ll start replaying stuff I’ve already listened to, and my thirst for '80s falsetto will lie unquenched amid the horde of other songs stabbing at me all over.


It’s a lot of pressure.

TANGENT: I also get anxious around comic strips that repeat the same word a lot of times for effect, because I have to read it all thirty times even though I’m aware that that’s stupid. Panels like this take me ten minutes in case I missed one:


Luckily, I’ve discovered a solution to the music attack problem. My player lets me run through all the songs in alphabetical order, irrespective of artist or album. The effect is a lot like shuffle because “Babylon” is followed by “Back in the USSR,” but I can feel secure in the knowledge that I will eventually get to everything that’s on there.


This method is also good for discovering that I have three different copies of “Hakuna Matata.” The only down side is that now I want to make graphs of which letters are most common for starting song titles.

The My Little Pony Path to Fame and Fortune

I spent the last ten days at the Kerrville Folk Festival, camping on a ranch in Texas with thousands of aging hippies and an internet connection just slightly slower than hair growth. After the seventeenth round of “The connection has timed out—Google is taking too long to respond,” I stopped trying. This distressing lack of perseverance is why I deserted you for two weeks without posting anything.

Kerrville is a music festival that focuses on singer-songwriters, so most of the people there don’t just listen to the music, they write and perform their own. I, on the other hand, do not, so I pretty much just lurk in corners saying “Anybody wanna hear ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ again?”

This is not to say I’ve never written any songs.

My first composition, entitled “Magic Enchanted Kingdom Flying Unicorn Pony Horses,” was serialized over two or three years of my elementary education and delivered from my favorite swing on the school playground. It chronicled the exploits of an adventurous and sparkly band of My Little Ponies, including the Unicorn, Pegasus, Earth Pony, and Flutter Pony varieties (not Sea Ponies; they were annoying in the TV show). I used to sing my song from a swing with my eyes closed and imagine that everyone on the playground would spontaneously gather around, drawn by my glorious voice and enthralling lyrics. I was super popular in elementary school.

This song was destined to be a million-seller for sure. Tragically, I was never signed to a major label, so I don’t have a recording of it. What I do have is a cassette tape of me telling stories about the same cast of characters.

I cannot have been older than six when this tape was made. Since I wasn’t big enough to set up the tape recorder myself, it starts with, “Well, I was going to tell a story if my Mama would leave.” Then, with the kind of intensity my adult self reserves for ideological debate or super chicken nachos, I tell about the unicorn flying enchanted kingdom magic horse ponies and their expedition to the big cave to defeat the giants and save Ponyland. Apparently, every one of the adjectives was completely necessary at all times. All of the sentences sound like this: “Then Starlight the sparkly white magic unicorn pony enchanted magic kingdom horse said—flying horse—said ‘Come on!’ and her friend Lemon the yellow flying magic horse enchanted kingdom pony unicorn came, and they flew to the scary enchanted magic cave of giants of Ponyland.”

The magic unicorn flying ponies also went on three successive picnics. You can tell they were enchanted picnics because they included all the delicacies I wasn’t allowed to eat in first grade. “Then Sparkle River and Lickety Split packed Fruit Roll-Ups and Doritos and real corn dogs and purple grape juice!” Flying magic enchanted unicorn sparkle kingdom horse ponies have the best parties. They totally would have listened to my song.