What a Depressing Hallowversary

Halloween is my favorite holiday.

I'm not sure when it started winning over Christmas, but I do know I was fairly young. I have many many memories of very happy Halloweens as a kid. Hell, my mom announced to me and my sister on October 27th 1994 that she and dad were getting divorced and I still managed to have a happy Halloween that year. It would have ruined Christmas.

Halloween 1997

We grew up with ALL the animated Halloween specials. The radio stations play Vince Guaraldi Trio's "Linus and Lucy" at Christmas time but that's how It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown starts. It will always be Halloween music to my ears. I learned the origin of the word "Halloween" from the 1970s special The Halloween that Almost Wasn't. And who wouldn't want a night rollicking with a slightly crazed witch like in Witch's Night Out? Plus good luck hearing "Werewolves of London" outside of October.

Then, in my mid-twenties when I became a pagan, Halloween took on the spiritual significance that had always been the only thing missing from the day. My favorite holiday becomes a double holiday? Sign me up! Samhain is, for many pagans, our spiritual New Year. It's a good time for me to make a resolution or two considering National Novel Writing Month starts the next day.

In 2006 I was still working but my health problems were becoming a work problem. I went home early from work at the candy store that Halloween. For the first time I was really, truly depressed on my favorite holiday. I didn't even dress up for Halloween. My poor, terrified,  ex-Jehovah's Witness husband got stuck with handing out candy that evening. I sat down in front of the TV and worked on a little decorative box on which I was trying to recreate the sky from Great Pumpkin (impossible, by the way, unless you're an actual artist).

We had started watching MSNBC earlier in the year because CNN was driving me nuts and MSNBC seemed to have a little bit of sanity on it. And that night we flipped over to MSNBC during the 8pm hour. In 2006 at 8pm on MSNBC was Countdown with Keith Olbermann. 

There are several reasons why this moment of first finding Countdown is stuck in my head forever. If we tuned in very long before the Worst Persons in the World segment, I wasn't paying much attention. But it was Halloween and when Toccata in D, which had always been Dracula's Theme in my head, started I paid attention. What stuck even more was what the guy on my TV was saying. He was calling out hypocrisy, and general douchieness. No one on TV did that except Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and they were comedians! This was on an actual news channel!

The next night I wanted to see more of this show and see if the Worst Persons bit had just been for Halloween. Of course, it hadn't been. I was hooked, my husband was hooked and we have been ever since.

This year we're losing the house we bought with a predatory loan in late 2005. The house is barely decorated because I couldn't see the point of unpacking stuff that would just need repacked when I was already packing the rest of the house. I'm not dressing up, though I do have a witchy outfit planned for handing out candy. And this year I won't close out trick-or-treat by watching the election and hurricane recovery coverage on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Tonight I will be lighting a number of candles for friends and for all those affected by the storm, and we will be donating to storm relief efforts.

Werewolves of DC

For the purposes of this blog entry, I'm going to refer to my husband as The Werewolf or variations thereof.  It's a nickname that's come from twitter and we kind kinda like it. :)

I had never been to DC, but The Werewolf had been several times.  Why were we there?  For a job interview.

Hello, 2012...

So here we are in 2012, a year people have been anticipating.

Let's get this out of the way, right now.  I don't think the world is going to end this year.  I'm planning to party on the winter solstice like I do every year because I'm a good heathen.  Okay it's mostly because I love eggnog, but I'm still planning my party.  I'm not concerned about Mayan calenders; look at them, they're circles, they don't end.  I'm not concerned about planetary alignments that are going to melt the ice caps overnight and flood the coasts (mostly because neither Countdown contributor and astronomer Derrick Pitts nor Jim Cantore have mentioned this danger).  Also I'm pretty sure The Weather Channel would have non-stop specials on our impending doom if it were even the slightest threat - "It WILL Happen Tomorrow!!1!"

That's not to say there isn't a lot going on this year.  There's the presidential election in November and the torturous 10 months leading up to it.  Who doesn't love being bombarded by political commercials that seem like rejected SNL spoof ads?  I especially love them now that corporations can pour boatloads of money into campaigns.  By November we'll all be begging to see strange guys happily singing about erectile dysfunction meds and that miserable gecko.  Senator Bernie Sanders is seriously charging toward overturning the Citizen's United ruling that gives us those terrible political ads (as well as outright buying our democracy). Bernie is one of the few truly good people in all of Congress, and I'll be supporting him in his effort any way I can.  

There's the Summer Olympics, too (no Quidditch, so I don't know how much I'll watch).  My big fear with the Olympics is that the park pool where I go will be even fuller than usual.  I finally found an outdoor pool to swim in last summer after five years of basically no swimming.  I am not going back to being pool-less.  It's 19 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm already dreaming of swimming this summer.  Some people might not find five years swim-less appalling, but I grew up swimming in huge outdoor, in-ground, semi-private community pool that covered an acre.  Yes - it was an acre of pool, with a water slide, and diving boards and it was set up like a lake so that most of the edges started at less than a foot and it got deeper toward the middle.  If I sound nostalgic it's because going to that pool almost every day every summer, meeting up with friends, swimming for hours on end was, for me, one of the best parts of growing up.

As far as my personal life, 2012 is looking huge but I can blog about pretty much none of that right now - partly because I don't want to jinx it and partly because so much is yet to be set in stone.  So, shhh... I'll talk about that another time.