Halloween is undoubtedly the best holiday of the year. Christmas gets steadily duller the older you get (until you have kids of your own, I guess), Thanksgiving just means I have to deal with family that I haven't seen or thought about since last Thanksgiving, and Valentine's Day is a shameless corporate marketing ploy that forces me to break up with whatever girl I'm dating at the time so that I won't have to buy her things. But Halloween is fun. If you're a kid, you get to dress up in an outfit totally unlike anything you're normally allowed to wear, stay up late and ask strangers for candy. If you're an adult, you also get to dress up in a ridiculous costume, but then get hammered, and maybe have anonymous sex with somebody dressed like the Burger King mascot.
The one thing that always does kind of irk me about Halloween, however, is the disparity between what girls get dressed up as oppposed to what guys wear. Girls invariably look hot and slutty; they basically have to throw on whatever is most whore-like in their wardrobe, put on a pair of devil horns, and then they're a "Sexy Devil". It's actually kind of funny because it extends to literally any kind of conceivable costume or occupation:
Guy: "So what are you supposed to be?"
Girl: "I'm a Sexy Janitor!"
Guy: "But janitors aren't sexy."
Girl: "I've got a tiny cutoff jumpsuit on so you can see most of my panties! Also, tits."
Guy: "Awesome."
I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with this practice, I just think it's unfair that I can't look as good. We men have to make do with either the comical or the mundane. I have guy friends that go in some kind of drag every year (although now that I think about it, that could be due to some underlying psychosocial disorder rather than a desire to be funny), and one year my friend Steinberg wore assless pants. That was his whole costume; just a normal shirt and then a pair of old jeans with the ass section removed. He would walk up to you, have a bit of idle conversation, and then turn around and walk off, causing whatever you were drinking to come out of your nose from laughter. Last year Suzanne and Eisy went as babies, and while Suzanne could pull off the look, seeing Eisy and all of his hairy glory in nothing but an adult diaper and a bonnet has done what I'm sure is lasting damage to my retinas. Stensby went as Oscar the Grouch this year, and while it was creative, no girl is going to want to go home with a guy covered in green paint and wearing a garbage lid as a hat. For the failed application of guy costumes in a practical setting, consider this: one of my girlfriends was out at a bar on Friday when a guy in a clown suit started to hit on her. As clowns are quite possibly the scariest things on earth, next to batboy, she was understandably freaked out. After about ten minutes of her staring at him in terror-mounting silence while he attempted to convince her to make sweet clown love later that night, she finally interrupted whatever asinine thing he was saying:
Clown: "....and that's why clowns have huge penises. Want to fuck?"
Megan: (Horrified silence)
Clown: "What?"
Megan: "I'm really sorry, but you're creeping me the fuck out right now, and I don't think I can look at you anymore without screaming. I have to go."
Clown: "No no wait, it's just the makeup! Look, here's my drivers license, this is how I really look!"
(I didn't actually see his drivers license picture, but Megan told me he looked kind of like an old boot that was left in the sun for too long, with a bad UGA haircut perched on top.)
Megan (walking off): "Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
Even though it's ultimately going to be a losing battle, I still can't bring myself to wear a costume that I'll look like a jackass in. Maybe it's inherent pride, or insecurity, or the fact that I have skinny legs that would look terrible in a dress, I don't know. This year, I was originally going to go as Han Solo, but after the fifth one of my girlfriends asked me if he was the one with the laser sword from Star Trek, I cried a little bit and then decided to go as Jack Sparrow, mainly because I knew I'd look totally hot wearing eyeliner. Since I usually wait until the last possible minute to get my costume, I was forced to scramble around and try and find an outfit that wouldn't make me look like a complete fucking retard. When I went into the Halloween Emporium, I noticed that they had a "Buccaneer of the Carribean" costume, on display for what I think was the reasonable price of one hundred million dollars. Upon closer inspection, I realized that this costume would in fact not make me look like a "Buccaneer of the Carribean", but more like a "Transvestite Vinyl Pirate". As this wasn't really the look I was going for, at least for Halloween, I was forced to hit the thrift store.
Thrift stores in Atlanta are weird. I'm from a fairly affluent neighborhood in St. Petersburg, Florida, and all of the thrift stores in the area reflect that. They're well maintained, everything is organized, and they even have changing rooms where you can try on the clothes. This is great; it enables you to make sure that the Armani shirt some rich guy threw away because the tag was bent fits you. In Atlanta, there are maybe one or two stores like that, but the rest of them are all in poor neighborhoods. This means that poor people are giving away their clothes, and they're then bought by other, poorer people, thus creating an unending cycle of me being unable to buy ironic t-shirts for two dollars. These stores are huge cavernous warehouses with bad industrial lighting and faded linoleum floors. The people that shop there are, for the most part, actually buying clothes for their families, and will universally give pretentious assholes like me who are only there to find shirts that look like they were made at Urban Outfitters dirty looks. They don't have changing rooms, because I'm assuming that if they did, homeless people would pee in them. Suprisingly, however, they have a fair amount of raw material for a pirate costume. Most of it came from the woman's section of the store, which caused the lady at the checkout counter to give me some disapproving looks, but since the whole ensemble cost about twenty dollars and she worked at a shitty thrift store, I didn't really care.
I had to cut up a lot of the clothes, and spent far to much time on the internet to see what Jack Sparrow actually looked like, but I think it came out pretty good. I actually ran into someone wearing the Vinyl Pirate costume at one of the bars we went to, and my outfit was clearly superior. After awkwardly staring at each other for a few minutes, we turned and walked away in pirate victory and pirate shame, resepectively. I didn't see him the rest of the night, so I'm assuming he left to go kill himself.
I have no idea what I'm going as next year. I'm sure that it'll be cheap, and I won't look too stupid, but that's about as far as I've gotten.
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