Cause I Want It All Or Nothing At All

Reading my friends' blogs, it's always feast or famine. Either I get a new post, or I have to continue starving. Today, I got all sorts of excited. I was going from friend's blog to friend's blog and was stoked to continually see that people had put in updates over the past day. Usually they come spaced out about once or twice a week, so this was an exceptional treat to have so many all at once. Now, maybe I'm a little slow, but it wasn't until about the third picture of someone's child dressed up as a pirate or a giraffe or a ladybug that I realized why every friend that I have who has spawned was wanton to post something.

That old Halloween sneaking up again. For the most part, I enjoy holidays. Big fan of Christmas and Thanksgiving. What's not to love about days revolving around large meals and taking the entire day off to do nothing besides eat those meals, and talk about other great meals? You give me a reason to sit down in front of food, and I'm your best friend. Here on the rock I take the missionaries out to dinner about once a month, not necessarily because I feel like I'm doing a good deed, but mostly because it gives me a legit reason to sit down to a nice steak dinner. (Side note: Here, they don't take a dinner break. Not kidding. They just take their lunch around noon, and work until 9:30. Blew my mind. And now I know why I wasn't called to this part of the world.)

Which brings me to Halloween. I struggle with this holiday as an adult. It's not a big meal type of holiday, it's more of the appetizers and dip type of holiday. Not that that's a bad thing, but it does knock it down a peg in the holiday totem pole. The other issue I have with it is dressing up. If you know anything about me, it's that I rarely do anything half-way. It's my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. So, if I'm supposed to dress up on Halloween, I either want an outstanding outfit, or nothing at all. I'm not the guy who shows up wearing cleats and a polo shirt and says he's a rugby player. I don't wear a red shirt and grab a plastic pitch fork and say I'm the devil.

I join three other friends, buy suits and sweater vests, wigs and glasses, and memorize catch phrases so we can recreate the Channel 4 News Team from Anchorman (I was Brick Tamblin, and I think I ate your chocolate squirrel). I do grow out a beard, cake it and my hair with flour, and make three dozen cardboard medallions so I can go as Alfred Nobel (It was right after Obama won the Peace Prize after being in office for a couple months. I figured since the actual committee had decided to hand them out willy-nilly style, I would help them out). I swing from the heels my friends, and sometimes I connect.

However, if I can't come up with a solid idea, I don't dress up. At all. This Halloween was that situation. I only had one decent costume idea, and it was to go as a WWE wrestler. I mean, when you already have a championship belt, the costume doesn't take much more. But again, if I was going to do it, we were going all out, and yes, I'm purposefully using the phrase "all out" to describe a wrestling costume. I'm talking black boots, black knee pads and a black speedo. That's it. And if I had the speedo, I just might have done it (Your retinas just sighed, relieved that there won't be pictures of said outfit). But I don't. So instead, I just put on a nice shirt and jeans, and went out for the night.

And you know something, Halloween was just as much fun not dressed up as it was dressed up. I knew this in fourth grade when I figured out that as long as you wear a baseball cap and a glove, people will still give you the candy. You didn't have to put on a Spiderman leotard and layout a mascara spiderweb on your face. Just put two items together and watch the bag fill. (Side note: Reading from Jake and Holli about how Carder went to town eating his candy and it reminded me about how cruel/genius my parents were with this scenario. They'd let us eat as much as we could that night. Never went to the point of a refund, but many years felt that it would be a relief if I had. The next day, we were allowed to pick 30 pieces to keep. That's it. Toughest draft ever. The rest went into a huge bowl and was taken into my Dad's office. That one act single handedly staved off diabetes.)

Somehow I forgot that no one really cares whether you made a working Optimus Prime costume that actually transforms, or just put on a flannel shirt, messed up your hair and carried your loot bag on a stick. I'll never know how I forgot that, but I remember that lesson now. So next Halloween, you can expect one of two things from me. You'll either get the best costume in the room, or no costume at all. Feast or famine.

Word.