First things first:  sent the summer teacher grant application off today, meaning that I’ve applied for nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of grants in 2013, which seems kind of ridiculous.  Now we get to move into my favorite thing: waiting to find out if people will be giving me money.  Cross your fingers for me, ‘k?

I’m in my office right now, hiding from Trick-or-Treaters because they’re too much of a pain in my ass to deal with.

I hate Halloween.  There, I said it.

This hasn’t always been true– in fact, for most of my life Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays if not my actual favorite holiday.  It was great when I was a kid, and there have been scattered moments of greatness in my adult Halloweens as well– dressing as Darth Maul right around when Episode One came out was certainly a highlight.  But I am officially too old and too crotchety to enjoy this shit anymore– working in a middle school, for one thing, has ruined Halloween for me, because it turns my kids into such huge pains in the ass– and on top of that the cultural shift where “slutty _____” has become the default costume for every girl over ten years old everywhere has turned me into a goddamn puritan.

Not everything has to be about fucking.  Halloween isn’t supposed to be about fucking.  There should not be any such thing as a “sexy cat costume.”  Cats aren’t sexy!  No one thinks cats are sexy, and if we find someone who breaks the rules and does we lock them the fuck up and feel good about ourselves for it!

(Which… huh.  I don’t appear to know how to link to Google Images sites anymore; Safari just puts the damn search term in the address bar.  Ah, there we go, it works in Chrome:  None of these women look like goddamn cats.  This is what Mardi Gras is supposed to be for, goddammit, not Halloween.  You wanna have a holiday called Dress Like A Stripper Day?  I’m in, and I’m willing to insist that guys dress like Chippendales for it too.  That’s not a cat.  It’s a stripper with stupid ears.)

Also, and this is more of a personal thing, we have two huge dogs and neither of them are terribly great about strangers, meaning that we have to do whatever we can to keep the doorbell from being rung all night.  We currently have our candy in a bowl on a picnic table in the driveway to keep the kids away from the dogs.  Many of the children, unsurprisingly, are not bright enough to notice it– some of them will literally walk around it on their way to the front door, which I’ve done my damnedest to make look uninviting  And it’s raining, which means that even if they were wearing cool costumes, and most of them aren’t, they’re covered up in raincoats and umbrellas and hoodies and shit.  Sacrifice for your art, goddammit.  Get some bloody waterproof makeup and show off the damn costume.  Assuming you’re actually dressed as something, that is.

(Huge ruckus outside; I prepare to actually literally go tell some teenage kids to get off my damn lawn.)

(Ruckus ends abruptly as it started; I think the neighbor’s Rottweiler tried to eat someone. Good.)

Note the following:  I will drop at least some of my objections to Halloween as soon as local jurisdictions acquire some goddamn sense, drop this October 31 nonsense (not one person in a hundred can explain why Halloween is October 31) and bloody move the holiday to the last Friday in October.  Halloween during the week is idiotic for a wide variety of reasons, not least among which is going to be the spike in suspensions at schools across the country tomorrow.

Bah.  Humbug.