Then What Happened?

Okay, I lied.  Go ahead and get excited.

The best thing about daylight savings time is that it makes my birthday weekend forty nine hours long every year. The worst thing about daylight savings time is everything else about it, but the most worst thing are the stories that people insist on telling about their DST-related mishaps, which always always ALWAYS have the exact same inane punchline. My colleague Sean once summed up the DST anecdote problem with a single, sweeping, ingenious rule: The only time you should tell a daylight savings time story is if it ends with "and that's why they died."

To conclude, if this week's strip makes fun of you, you deserve it.

Apparently this bloated weekend was also homecoming weekend at UCLA. I'm really not sure what purpose homecoming weekend serves at the collegiate level, since there's no dance, I don't think there's a parade, and at this stage in our lives there are precious few drunken virginities to be lost in the gymnasium. I don't even know if colleges have gymnasiums. But according to the banners that I caught glimpses of on my few cherished outings into the campus proper beyond the rigid confines of the law school, I noticed that homecoming weekend also serves as parents weekend. I'm quickly realizing that all this probably means about as much to you as it does to me. Moving on.

Halloween! Since tenth grade I've maintained an intellectual front against the celebration of all holidays. It's intellectual in that I still celebrate holidays, but I'm very disdainful of every mouthful of hormone-saturated turkey I ingest. Given the overabundance of sickly, recessive, Celtic blood that trudges through my veins, it was only logical that I would hate the modern manifestation of Halloween most of all, since as western bastardizations of once sacred spiritual festivals go it really takes the black and orange cake. I'll spare you the painfully obvious diatribe about commercialization and Harry Potter and blah blah blah youth-oriented marketing. It's enough to say that Halloween was always high on my list of intellectually objectionable calendar entries.

And yet, in the past few years, I've come to terms with the fact that, God damn it, I fucking love Halloween. There are two reasons for this undeniable affinity. The more mundane reason is that it's very near my birthday, so I always had positive memories associated with it growing up. The second, more philosophically satisfying reason is a different gloss on my broader anti-holiday stance. Halloween is the last bout of (now) secular, hedonistic revelry before the Dark Season of heavy-handed, obligatory, family-focused holidays pounds its deafening hammer on the souls of the wicked and righteous alike. Similarly, back in the day when Halloween meant something to Celts, it marked the transition point between the two seasons of the year, the night when the wall between the human world and the spirit world was breached as the Earth transitioned from the joyous, fruitful Spring and Summer into the cold and desolate Fall and Winter. I think you see where I'm going with this.

So in conclusion, slip on that sexy red devil costume and drink yourself gay. It's Halloween!

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This page contains a single entry by hb published on October 28, 2002 11:50 AM.

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