Looking at all your Halloween pictures and costumes and everything made me wonder when exactly I became the Spinster Aunt of Halloween. It didn't even occur to me to dress up this year.
"Why don't we ever dress up for Halloween?" I whined to Randy. "We" being code for "me" which is really code for "you", as in: "if there's something new wrong with me it's totally your fault".
"'Ever'?" Randy echoed. "You mean since last year?"
Ah. Nice catch, Randy. You're officially off the hook for when I locked my keys in my car last week. I did dress up last year, for the office contest. As the ocean. Oh yes. It was either that or go as "Fired!" and I was pretty much going as that every day. Allow me to break it down.
1) If you're thinking about dressing up as the ocean, quit it.
2) Okay! If you're thinking about dressing up as the ocean, first you need to have some kind of tentative grasp of the magnitude of the ocean as an entity, the enormity of it, and you need to try to visualize all of the mysterious facets of the ocean and maybe meditate on how you're going to incorporate all of its overwhelming life and history and majesty into one simple, humble costume. In short, you need to figure out what's going to be the sand part, what's going to be the wavy part, and what's going to be the middle part.
3) Sand Part: This was a pretty easy part. I glued a bunch of seashells on some white socks with airplane glue. It's important you realize here that I don't mean model airplane glue, I mean glue that Boeing uses to glue actual fucking airplanes together. And not "together" in the sense that "one airplane part plus another airplane part equals more of a whole airplane", but "together" like sometimes aeronautical engineers get bored and glue one entire airplane ON TOP of another entire airplane just because they can't get over how strong this goddamned glue is. I wouldn't harp on the glue so much if my feet hadn't been freezing inside their shell-wrapped cocoons thanks to the relentless chemical fusing process, and also if I could wiggle my toes independently right now.
4) Middle Part: The Middle Part made the Sand Part look like cake. Icy, pointy cake with the toxicity of a mercury sno-cone, but cake just the same. The Middle Part was a blue Hanes sweatsuit from Target covered in foam sea creature stickers that I bought in an enormous plastic container. As I began the sticker application I became slowly convinced that I had to apply all of the sea creatures or I wouldn't be wholly representative of the ocean. All of the lobster stickers ganged up in a shellfish posse around my sweat-ankles, the octopi hovered thither and yon, and I was pretty good about sticking the little clown fish stickers around the little coral reef stickers for about fifteen minutes until my focus made its inevitable slow crawl from quality to quantity. As my focus is so very wont to do.
5) Wavy Part: I almost can't talk about the Wavy Part without getting weepy. Any scientist worth his nametag lanyard can tell you that the most important aspect of the ocean-- both sociologically and philosophically-- is the Wavy Part. By, like, a lot. Now given that the Sand Part is my feet and the Middle Part is my body, it stands to reason that the Wavy Part should be my head. See? See what I did there? That's how they do it in Science.
I bought the biggest styrofoam disk that Michael's sold-- I don't even know how big it was, maybe 16, maybe 18 THOUSAND INCHES in diameter-- so that I could create the surface of the ocean on top of this flat base and then (yes) strap it to the top of my head.
I know.
So I mounded a desert island out of brown clay on top of the disk toward the edge, covered the clay island with actual sand, and then secured a gigantic fake terrarium palm tree from Petsmart to it.
Next I formed waves over the rest of the disk with varying shades of blue play dough. I was remarkably bad at this part, but it didn't matter because I was in that Zone that people go into when they're in the middle of passionately creating something imaginative. You know, half "I can't believe I just spent twenty-seven dollars on a plastic tree for a lizard" and half "I hope everyone else feels like a fucking idiot when they see how awesome this is". It's good stuff.
I walked around the office the whole day dripping weak purple lobsters in my wake and shaky-arm struggling to hold the forty-pound Wavy Part up off my head long enough for my brain to stop hemorrhaging. Most people guessed that I was a blue mushroom because I'm 5' 7" and only six people could actually see what the fuck was on my head, three people in my department had to go to Urgent Care with acid burns after touching my shell socks, and for the first time in ten years the office decided to spontaneously forgo the annual costume contest and just keep the hundred dollar cash money prize. Presumably to buy four-and-a-half fake palm trees for the office terrarium.
So! In a nutshell! That's why I didn't dress up this year. My creative soul was slapped in the face by corporate America, and what's worse I totally hate science now. Yeah. So thanks a lot for reminding me, Randy. Way to go.
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