Halloween

...is over, thank God. This is a holiday without much of an upside for me. My bad food habits run more towards chips than candy, for one thing. Sure, there's always the fact that a lot of women use the holiday as an excuse to get dressed up like hookers on the stroll, but the only Halloween party I was invited to this year was at the office, so that aspect would have been ruined by middle-aged women with midsections textured like trays of freshly baked cinnamon rolls. And that was before I got caught up in the opening series of the '06-'07 flu season. There's nothing more obnoxious than trying to get from couch or bed to the bathroom in complete darkness so as to avoid little hands pounding on my door to beg for candy. Actually, in my neighborhood, the most common costume is "thug teenager", and they don't trick-or-treat so much as shank-or-treat. But fortunately, my lights-out strategy worked, due in part, that there were more larger groups of kids going around to one another's homes, rather than simply going door to door. And with good reason--my neighborhood has a higher concentration of sex offenders than the Neverland Ranch. Bring on Thanksgiving--any holiday with customs focused on gluttony and football-watching is one that I'm solidly behind!