Happy Halloween.

Our jack-o-lantern has an accidentally cleft palate this year, and lots of unintentional, Mike Tyson-esque facial tattoos.

When I was a kid, my mother told me that there was an age at which children stopped dressing up for Halloween.*

What was this decidedly unmagical age? I don’t know, because lame though some of my costumes have been, I’ve dressed up every year and I’m doing it again this year. My husband and I did have some issues with our dreaded couple costume, but those issues have been resolved and I think we’ve come to a compromise that is neither sickening nor horrific. (Here’s a hint:  Who would win in a fight?)

I love Halloween costumes and I plan to keep dressing up or the rest of my life, even if that means that someday I’ll  have to bribe a nurse to replace my dentures with plastic vampire fangs for an hour, when the little kids come trick or treating at the rest home.

* I don’t know where Mom got that you-grow-out-of-Halloween thing. She dresses up every year too. Maybe she just didn’t want us going door to door as teens and scaring the bejesus out of the neighbors.

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Obama is in town.

It is a strange thing to look out your back window and see hundreds of people. It’s a very strange thing to take out the compost and hear crowd

The line was like this for a good hour.

noises. You’d think I’d be used to it. I live in Bridgeport’s South End. Once a year thousands of hippies and deadheads camp out for the weekend at the end of my street. I once got stuck in a traffic jam almost completely made up of VW buses that were trying to get onto the camp grounds. And the Puerto Rican Day Parade completely fills up our neighborhood each July. But this is different. President Barack Obama is speaking at a rally that’s taking place up the block at the Harbor Yard arena, so we have lines of people who are hoping to get into the free event, very large red helicopters flying low over the house, roadblocks and all sorts of other exciting things happening.

We went out and checked out the line earlier, and it was cool – as it always is – to see lots and lots of people on a block can otherwise be pretty desolate.

Still, seeing strangers out my window, helicopters rattling my home and suspicions about just how tight security gets when the President comes to town has me feeling a mite paranoid.

Which is cool, because, as I said in my last post, that’s what we’re celebrating this weekend: Fear.

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Still scared.

If I were Alice, the sight of this guy would have sent me shrieking and clawing back up the rabbit hole.

I thought I was over it.  I appeared to have outgrown it. I was sure that it was gone and would never trouble me again. Unfortunately, like so many other things from the ’80s that should be gone forever, my fear of caterpillars has returned.

 

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The Halloweeners

This costume creeps me out, and not because of the obvious pun. I can't figure out whether it's the couple's stance or the guy's hair, but looking at this picture for too long makes me feel dirty.

As soon as my writing samples and third semester project were submitted yeserday, I was felled by a migraine headache. I’m just now coming out of it, which is annoying because today was the day I’d planned to figure out a Halloween costume before heading off to work.

I still have time, but we have a dilemma – my husband wants to do a couples costume this year and most of the couples costumes out there are either saccharine (Cinderella and the Prince) stupid (salt and pepper), demeaning (Hef and a Playboy bunny) or kind of vile (see photo.)

We’ve been going back and forth quite a lot on this. We both like mythology, so Odysseus and Penelope? What about Persephone and Hades? Leda and the swan? That last one is a little too gross.

We’re a more than a little little geeky, so I was pushing a reverse-gender Zoe and Wash from Firefly and he was pushing Arthur Dent and the Hitchhiker’s guide. Since my husband’s been Arthur Dent for Halloween for close to 20 years, I shot that one down. Then we thought of being binary code. Now we’re mining Arthurian legend, but we’re unexcited by the concepts we’re coming up with.

Essentially, we did better when we were coming up with our own costumes. Last Halloween, I was Carmen Sandiego and he was Arthur Dent. The year before I was Little Bopeep From Hell and he was Arthur Dent. The year before I wore a goth ballgown and he was Arthur Dent. You get the idea. So this year, unless inspiration strikes, at least one thing is certain: My husband will be Arthur Dent.

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Oh Rocky!

People tend to get annoyed whenever they feel mainstream culture is co-opting a cult phenomenon, but I actually enjoyed Glee's Rocky Horror episode.

Last night Glee took on Rocky Horror show. The reactions have ranged from outrage to, well, glee.

I’ve seen head-shaking of the nothing-is-sacred variety. I’ve seen reactions by people who love both Glee and Rocky Horror and think that combining the two is the best thing since pockets.  I’ve seen opinions from people who are annoyed that Dr. Frank-N-Furter was played by an actress. But one of my favorite drag queens, Pandora Boxx, tweeted this morning that she loved the episode and thought that Mercedes as Frank-N-Furter was an interesting twist.  Read more

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Facebook is the devil. But I can’t give it up.

It’s happened again. Disappearing friend syndrome. One day my friend is there, on Facebook. The next day, I want to post a video of an animal yelling “Helen” on her wall, and she’s gone. Not just gone from my list of friends, but gone from the network entirely. Her profile has been erased. She’s departed the Matrix. She’s given up Facebook.*

I can’t do it, but I understand the reasons why I should give up Facebook. This past weekend, I was walking down a very crowded street in Soho when I saw two faces I normally see only on Facebook. They were in the throng of people, moving past me in the opposite direction. I was disoriented for a moment. In fact my moment of confusion was all it took for me to lose them in the crowd again. So instead of greeting this couple on the street and congratulating them on their recent marriage in person, I sheepishly posted a greeting to a Facebook wall. That’s just wrong. Read more

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The October deadline SNAFU.

Oh man.

I had all these things I wanted to post about today: Being in touch with my inner monkey, my imaginary all-girl rock band, why I hate Fight Club, my burning desire for a Fulbright, a newfound love of M.I.A., strong verbs vs. modifiers, natural selection, trichotillomania and my unrequited teen crush on Wil Wheaton.

These are all the things sitting in my queue of unfinished posts. Sadly, they won’t see the light of day for a while, because I’m buried under an MLA manual, an essay, my students’ midterm grades and several disorganized pages worth of novel. Blah. No fun.  Adding urgency to this is the fact that I (like Erin) promised myself I would post to this blog once a day (well, once a weekday) for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, that means you all get this snore-inducing post for today. I’m actually not even going to announce this lame-o post on Facebook or Twitter. Sorry about this. I will try to be more interesting tomorrow.

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On crossing the finish line.

I always identified with the hare, the grasshopper and other Aesopian goof-offs.

It happens every single time. Despite years of having to meet deadlines, despite months of work on a project, and despite many hours of effort, I always try to sabotage myself right before I complete a task.

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The biological time bomb.

When I was younger, I didn’t believe in a biological clock. It seemed incredible that I would ever desperately want children.

Don’t get me wrong – I think I’ve always expected that at some point in the future I’d probably have kids, but I never actively desired them. And in many ways, I still don’t. The idea of having kids is terrifying on quite a few levels, actually. For one thing, I think I’ve mentioned that I worry a lot. Having small humans to worry about would make me a neurotic wreck. For another, I have a weak stomach and kids do nasty things. And then there’s the fact that I have a hard time communicating with people under the age of seven.

So I was pretty shocked about a year and a half ago when my brain started ticking like a time bomb. This state gives new meaning to the phrase “of two minds.” My rational brain doesn’t want children;  it wants to continue living its current rock star lifestyle. Meanwhile, there’s this weird primal voice in my brain that’s just howling for children. I smack it down, but it has weird ways of fighting back. I get strangely emotional when I see baby clothes. Holding an infant sends me into a pheromone-induced haze. The only thing that snaps me out of it is a child howling.

None of this has been helped by the fact that my doctor told me last year that my childbearing days are trickling away. I was 31 at the time. I was celebrating the fact that my 30s were the new, improved 20s and this old guy was telling me that I have a dusty uterus!

Evolution is a bitch. But so is karma. Because I find that some people simply don’t believe in biological clocks. And men I’ve talked to – one of whom was a medical student – seem to believe that the biological clock is a social construct. Oh dear – I used to think that too.

In the meantime, two good things have come of this. The first is the realization that the biological clock will eventually go away. Either I will age out of it or I will have a kid. The second good thing? Thanks to my doctor’s remarks, I now have a great name for an all-female country-western band. Click below, on “continue reading,” for a look at our first album cover. (Apologies to those who don’t see a page break and are just getting an image.) Read more

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A world-class event.

This won’t be a long post, nor will it be filled with my usual embarrassing personal revelations.  All I have to say here is that not only did the student reading last night go well, but I am in awe of my colleagues from the Fairfield University MFA program.

From the new student, who got up to read his work even though he’s never set foot on Enders, to the poet who riffed on Gertrude Stein like he was performing a guitar solo, to the memoirists who put their most private moments out there for us to see – you all rock. Hard.

Also rockstars? The students who didn’t read but showed up to support us, even though they have jobs, families and lives. And the student rep who organized the whole event, and who chose not to read, even though we would have welcomed a reading from her.

It’s really cool to be a part of this group of people.

Now, before this post gets cloying, I’m going to put an end to it. Just as  my colleague Steve Otfinoski put an end to some adorable sacrificial bunnies in his reading last night.

Update: This post is titled “A world class event” because that’s how we were described by the store manager during his in-store announcement. I thought I’d written that into this post but I must have edited it out. Whoops.

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