I should start by saying that I have a bit of a bad attitude when it comes to Halloween. I don’t often dress up. In fact, I don’t think I’ve sported a costume since I was about 14 years old. I’m the jerk at work who cynically criticizes the people who dress up on Halloween day. I stand in the corner, eat the food they bring in, and quietly mock their attempt at remaining young. But somewhere deep down in my black heart, I have a fond remembrance of Halloween and how I used to look forward to it.

In hindsight my Mum kind of ruined me when it comes to Halloween costume ideas. She used to get so excited to dress her kids up and take them around the neighborhood that she would just come up with costumes for me and my brother to wear. We never really had to work on what we were going to be. I remember one year my Mum dressed my brother as the Statue of Liberty. He wore a grey sweat suit, his face and hands were painted grey and my Mum made him a torch and head crown thing. He hated the costume and proceeded to walk around without the torch or crown as some sort of angry grey man costume. It did not affect his candy intake.

Now that I’m older and my Mum isn’t as excited to spend a week sewing a Ninja Turtle costume for me, I just don’t have the personal drive to come up with something myself. It just seems like a whole lot of work for not so much fun. I’ll admit that I have a bad attitude in this repect, and so this year I thought I’d try to rise above my own basic negative views of dressing up as a jackass for a night and dive into the festivities.

At first I thought maybe I could go as an astronaut since that’s what I always wanted to be as a child. NASA however, did not return my phone calls and so that plan fell through almost immediately. Second choice: Batman. As it turns out, Batman costumes are expensive and actually quite lame when put on a 25 year old man. Plus, I was Batman for halloween in 1992 so I didn’t want to repeat. For a brief while I thought I might be General George Patton Jr. That way, I would be able to walk around yelling at people all night with an acceptable excuse as to why. Once again, my bad attitude surfaced and I thought that tracking down a Patton costume would take much more time and energy than I was willing to dedicate.

So I’m probably just going to put on some kind of hat that is unique to a particular occupation and let people’s immaginations do the rest. I do want the record to show that I intended on trying this year. I wanted to put the effort in. I just didn’t get around to it.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!