It’s Wednesday, which means you only have two days until your Friday Halloweekend kickoff parties.
And because the internet tells me we college students are a band of lazy children who cannot do work for ourselves, you probably have fully procrastinated choosing a costume.
Fortunately, I’ve come up with some scary, easy last-minute costume ideas that are sure to be a hit at whatever spooky soiree you attend.
• The knowledge that you and everyone you love will die someday, and someday relatively soon (compared to the overall arc of human history) no one will even remember your name. People live on in stories, sure, but very few peoples’ stories outlive them by much. What do you know about your greatgreat grandfather?
• My elementary lunchroom attendant Mrs. Wojikowski, whom everyone called “Mrs. Woe” for short. Mrs. Woe had electric-blonde hair that hovered over her head like a storm cloud perpetually lit by lightning, and she was quick to raise her voice and write your teacher a note if you stepped out of line. When my friends and I had carrot-building contests, in which we used baby carrots as Lincoln Logs and saw who could build the most impressive structure, it was Mrs. Woe who shut the whole operation down. It was my fear of Mrs. Woe that caused me to pee my pants in first grade instead of asking for permission to use the bathroom. It was to Mrs. Woe that I unconvincingly argued that someone spilled their lemonade.
• The mace I carry, shipped together with cookies in a care package from my mom. The mace is scary because it’s a symbol of the patriarchy. The patriarchy is scary because I cannot walk alone at night without a reasonable fear of being sexually assaulted. The patriarchy is also scary because some people refuse to understand that this fear is well-grounded and specific to the experience of being a woman.
• Taking a BuzzFeed quiz about which character from “Hey Arnold!” you are, in which the answer instead reveals the exact circumstances of your death. It tells you the time and place, and it also gives you an abbreviated list of people to whom you should have apologized but chose not to. At the end, it informs you that the character from “Hey Arnold!” you most resemble is Brainy.
• The fact that your glasses and braces mean that you are evolutionarily inferior. In a time before glasses, you would have been basically useless at most physical tasks. How could you hunt or cook when every part of the world looks like a multicolored blob? What business has you passing on your genes in this world?
• The raven you thought you heard say something to you. You must have misheard. It must have croaked, or squawked; it could not have said your name. But when it makes direct eye contact, you’re more inclined to think that what you heard as it took away wasn’t a rustling of wings, but rather a whisper, and the whisper was a date in the future, and you do not know what will happen on this date, but every time you think about it, your eyesight darkens infinitesimally.
Have a safe and happy Halloween, everybody!
