Halloween

Whenever anyone asks me what my favourite holiday is, I always say Halloween. My rationale is that while Christmas and Thanksgiving give good ideas for how they should be celebrated, they feel the need to attach themselves to some kind of moral principle, such as sharing and reflecting on what we should be grateful for. Easter is attached to religious meaning, Valentine's Day is only applicable to people in relationships, etc. Halloween is about dressing up in costumes and eating candy. It's the most low-pressure, person-focused mainstream holiday.

But realistically, it gives difficulty for adults who choose to celebrate it. Since I'm living in a house now that isn't in student housing, I had my first real chance to hand out candy (even though my place was half family homes, children wouldn't approach it because of the student population, and nobody chose to decorate). I got two boxes of candy, since I didn't want to overestimate. One was full of fun-size chocolate bars, and one full of twizzlers and twizzler-variants.

Everywhere people were  offering fun-sized chip bags, but I knew better than to purchase. I remembered how when I was a kid, I felt the chip bags were disappointing because while they filled up a lot of space in your treat bag, most of it was air. I know that chip bags need air to avoid being crushed during shipping and they're not actually trying to rip you off, but if you're a kid and your goal is to leave once your bag is full, it's not a good feeling to find a good percentage of your earnings is empty space.

I know that people make fun of fun-size bars because a full bar would be even more fun, but let's be realistic. You can't expect a full-sized bar per house, and a bag full of fun-sized chocolate bars is as high-density candy profit as you will get. I had the Twizzlers as a nut-free option in the case of allergies. Even chocolate bars you wouldn't  expect (Aero and Caramilk) have a "May contain nuts" warning on them.

But no children came by our place, even though 'i saw them trick-or-treating and I left our porch light on and the candy visible. My roommates wanted to go out to the Apollo Theatre and watch a horror movie. The Apollo is a single-screen theatre that serves wine and beer and offers tables to set them on. Never really thought about it, but why not? It would be a weird stipulation that you couldn't be watching a program during the consumption of alcohol, especially since bars, planes, and other place with alcohol preset feature televised entertainment. We watched The Shining. This time slot probably was during prime trick-or-treating hours.

After that, we had a few friends over. They were dressed in costume. We weren't. I've got a costume from last year ("The Emperor of Evil"), but I didn't bother putting it on.

Recently, I ran into someone on the street selling a book he had written. The price he gave was $5. It appears he wanted to bypass needing a publisher. It's called Coryworld, and it's "A wacky and futuristic science fiction novella where children race and dance inside a simulator, except for two of them :)"

By Gap Yuet Bing Ding. I'll let you guys know how it reads.

I got a friend request on Facebook from the son of the chief of Karadie, the man who gave me the nickname "Elephant".  I don't even know how he found me, since he's never heard the name "Gryphon" (I was Ali Traore over there) and he's not friends with anyone who would know my Canadian name. But he had to be so beautiful, referring to me as "Gryphon Elephant" ( showing he acknowledges my Canadian identity while referring to something shared between us). And when he introduced himself, he spoke of himself as"From Karadie". Karadie is the local spelling, while the global spelling is "Karadje".

So much strength in a short message to me.