things kevin hates

Now, I don’t mean this as a personal attack against those of you who enjoy Halloween. But it’s not my cup of tea, not at all. It combines a couple of big things I don’t like with a very small number of things I do like. And besides, it’s on a Saturday this year, and it’s very hard to drag me away from my house on a Saturday during the college football season.

Things I don’t like about Halloween:

The costumes. Now, lots of people have amazing, hilarious, clever costumes. But if you’re going to do Halloween right, you have to have a costume. You look like a tool if you don’t, and if you just half-ass it you still look like a tool. So partaking in Halloween requires three things: creativity (to come up with a great costume idea), hard work (to actually pull said idea off), and a certain degree of exhibitionism (because any costume is ultimately a plea of “Hey, look at me!”). I’m pretty lacking in all three of those areas. I’m always amazed at the costume ideas people come up with—all sorts of things I’d never think of. And the amount of time, money, and work involved in pulling off a good costume is way too high. And, despite the fact that I have a blog, and despite the fact that I do like to think of myself as a very, very, very minor celebrity, and despite the fact that I do enjoy performing (an exhibitionist hobby if there ever were one), I don’t need the attention that comes from the perfect, outrageous, intelligent costume. And the problem with Halloween that you need to have some sort of costume. At least with Mardi Gras you can just put on one of those striped purple green and gold rugby shirts and leave it at that. But with Halloween people are gonna judge you if your costume isn’t good. So why bother?

The crowds. In the days after last year’s Halloween, I talked to people I knew about what they had done for Halloween, and just about every single person said, “We were on Frenchman Street.” Everybody. From every possible group, from the theatre people—whether high schoolers and college students or people old enough to have AARP cards—to my friends from grad school, to the Indian UNO students I play cricket with. Extrapolating from the percentages of people who told me they were there, I concluded that roughly 472,518 people were on Frenchman Street for Halloween. That’s way too many people. I don’t mind a crowd every now and then but that’s just ridiculous.

Things I do like:

The fun size Crunch bars. Oh man those things are awesome. Don’t come to my house expecting any of those; they’re all for me.
The scantily clad women. But in the days of facebook, you can just wait for those pictures to show up on the internet, you don’t actually have to get out on Halloween for that.

So see, the two things I do like, I don’t have to leave my house for. And leaving my house causes both of the things I don’t like. So I’ll be enjoying Halloween from the couch in front of the 46-inch high-def flat screen TV.