Happy October!

Today is the last day of October, and it's finally acting like it. Hurrah for mornings when I can see my breath and I have to scrape the frost off my windshield!

Since today is the last day of October, it's also Halloween. Normally, I pay a negligible amount of attention to this holiday, but it was more interesting than usual this year. The high school and middle school orchestras played a Halloween concert last night (in which only three out of the eight songs played had anything to do with today), and today we went around to all the elementary schools and played the music there for the kiddies. It went pretty well, but not super exciting and atrociously horrible or anything. After two weeks of trying, I finally got my stand partner/friend's little brother to voluntarily talk to me. That's pretty much the only noteworthy thing that happened. Can't you tell how incredibly exhilirating it was?

As part of this, we were all expected to wear costumes. I was super geeked about mine. I haven't quite decided what I was/am (I'm still wearing it because I love it and it smells delightful). The original goal was to be the personification of autumn/a tree in autumn, which is what most people interpreted it as. There were a couple other thoughts on it though, including a forest goddess and a fairy. I wore a long flowing brown skirt (pretty much the only skirt I've actually liked since 5th grade), my orange crush shirt turned inside out, and brown tank top on top of that. My hair was in two braids, and pinned to the shirts and braids were dozens of beautiful fall leaves (there's currently still a fallen oak leaf right next to my face and it's smelling really good). To add to the effect, I went barefoot for most of the day (which I normally do anyway), painted dark brown spiraling vine patterns all down my arms, wore bracelets of all sorts of fall colors, and wore four pairs of fall colored earrings at once. I currently have two hooks through each earring hole (it wasn't a pleasant process and my earlobes are still kind of sore) and hanging from each of those hooks is another hook. I'll have to post pictures because it was a fun little get-up.

Gathering the leaves for my costume was quite an interesting experience. On Tuesday afternoon I got a phone call from my friend Morgan who told me that she was bored out of her mind and wanted to come over to my house. I told her I had to go on a stroll to get leaves to stick to myself. She called me "such a freaking hippie" and said she'd be over in a few minutes to come with me. When she pulled up, we didn't go walking right away. In her car she had a bunch of leftover baguettes from the Panera where she works so we had sword fights with a couple and then each took one to chomp on while we walked. So we walked around my neighborhood (which consists primarily of Catholic families who send their kids to private schools to avoid the depravity of public education) singing and talking about random things while picking beautiful leaves off trees and carrying whole baguettes which we occasionally took a bite out of. To make matters even more interesting, halfway through her bread, Morgan decided she didn't want to eat all of it so every once in a while she would tear off a piece and see how far she could drop-kick it down the street. I was walking around barefoot in rolled-up jeans and a vintage t-shirt with my signature purse trying to hold all the leaves we picked, and Morgan had on a mismatched pair of chucks (one was purple and the other was leopard print) an old pair of jeans with a hole at the knee, and a hoodie that belonged to her dad. We probably looked like we were on something. Some of the looks we got were priceless.

The only thing I did that I normally do on Halloween (ever since freshman year) is what my school calls Treat the Hungry. Small groups of people sign up to walk door to door on a certain street and collect canned goods for the Free Store/Food Bank. I went with Amy and Erin, two of my friends. The experience as a whole was unusual, and not always in a good way. All three of us had unorthodox costumes. I've never heard of anyone being fall (there was one girl in the orchestra who said she would've done it if she had had time to collect leaves), Amy was a Christmas-y elf, and Erin was something from some British movie called Clockwork Orange that I hadn't heard of and nobody got the reference until we dropped the food off at our school.

First we'll make some general statements. The street we did was very long (in fact, it was called Long Lane, but we only did the short part of Long Lane, which was still pretty long), and most of the people who live on it didn't pass out candy. There were therefore very few kids trick-or-treating so whenever we got to a house they were very eager to give us candy in addition to cans. And they were handing out the good stuff too. It was mostly chocolate and there were a lot of Reese's. Mmmmm..... There's also a little valley to help water drain away from the yards between nearly every house, and my 10+ year old wagon really wasn't handling it too well. My wagon had other issues too, such as the fact that it tipped over easily, was excessively noisy, and only had three sides. We managed to fix the last problem to some degree with a plastic bag and some thread and rubber bands (which I of course was carrying with me in my purse).

Now for some specific instances. We all met at Amy's house because she lives close to Long Lane. Once we actually started going to the houses, our adventures began. The first house gave us Reese's, which got me extra pumped because I love Reese's and the people in my neighborhood normally pass out the cheap stuff since there are so many kids running around.

The next house actually had candy bars for each of us. Not the little fun-size snickers, but decent sized candy bars.

The next house with people at it had a little girl and her mom sitting on the front porch. When we told the woman we were there to collect the canned goods, she told us to hang on a second and talk to Hannah (the little girl) while she went and got something. I had no issue with that as I'm around kids all the time, so I proceeded to say hello and ask her what grade she was in at school. No response. I asked her what her favorite game to play was. No response (I have to admit, at that point it was reminding me of a random encounter in Dungeons and Dragons where we fought a mindflayer and its thralls who didn't respond much to anything we said). So the three of us just stood there awkwardly glancing around and every now and then looking back at the kid. The poor thing looked absolutely terrified of Erin, and I can see why. Her costume was a bit dark. Eventually, we stopped trying to start conversation. Out of nowhere, Hannah just yelled "Hi!" and looked vacantly past us and didn't say anything else. It was weird. Finally her mom came back out and we went on our way waving to both of them. I think the little girl had some sort of mental deficiency. I wish we had known that before so we wouldn't have responded so awkwardly.

Nothing overly momentous happened until close to the end of the first side of the street. The three of us walked up to a house with a strobe light on in the garage and music blasting from a CD player. The song was, of all things, "My Humps". Standing in front of the garage was and old man with a pipe to smoke in one hand and a bottle of strong liquor in the other. He directed us towards the house where we were greeted by a handful of adults who looked, smelled, and acted completely intoxicated. They also had a toddler with them, and I felt very sorry for the tyke.

By the time we headed down the other side of the street, it was dark and some of the unlit houses looked very menacing. After knocking on a few on the darkened doors, we decided that it was best to just skip them. Who knows how many adventures we might have missed out on because we didn't have the time and my two comrades were unwilling to go up to each house.

The second side of the street didn't really have much worth telling. All the people wanted to get rid of their candy so we got like two handfuls each at every door. There were however two things that might deserve mention.

We split up towards the end to go quicker, and one of the houses Erin and I went up to had an adorable old man living in it. He urged us both to take the rest of his candy (a lot of it will probably end up feeding Tim, Amy's older brother) and then proceeded to give us a little history lesson about the origins of Finneytown High School. It was interesting to meet someone whose grandson had been part of the first class to graduate from our high school.

There was another house that provided us with quite an unpleasant, awkward, disturbing, etc. experience that the reader could do without knowing.

When we arrived at the school to drop off our collections, Erin's costume was recognized for the first time all evening. One of the history teachers (the best history teacher)/coordinators of community service stuff had seen the movie. He's a rather unusual person, and what's even more unusual is that his name is Lynn, until last year his mom (whose name is Gay) worked at the same school he did, he went to college with both my parents, he gave my older brother his first nosebleed, and his best friend grew up in the first house my family owned in Finneytown. At the school I also got to see my friend Anna's final costume (she had been trying to decide what to be for weeks), and another argument broke out about what specifically my costume was supposed to be.

That's just about it. I don't have any nice concluding statement to finish with, so there you go.