Halloween: Trick or fellowship?

When I was young, Halloween was an exercise in creatively wearing snowpants. Such is life when you life in wretched Iowa and snow starts in October. The artistry stemmed from creating a costume that could be worn under fifteen layers of clothing and still made you look like Tinkerbell, not a giant Technicolor marshmallow.

Halloween always drums up nostalgia: waddling around in the cold and delighting over the candy procured. Everyone would have the best houses mapped out, and we'd all try to convince our parents that we should go trick-or-treating six miles from home, because those houses had king sized candy bars, but Mrs. Richter down the street handed out stale old raisins.

However, as one ages, Halloween transforms from a practice in dressing warmly to a practice in freezing one's ass off. Soon Mom and Dad don't have to worry about their precious little children catching cold because the little munchkins are now college students parading around as slutty bumblebees. Perhaps it's part of the fundamental human preponderance of identity: we do not know who we are, but becoming who we are not allows us to break constraining mores and explore life outside the Self. Or, maybe too much alcohol and gratuitous sex doesn't count when you're a sexy astronaut.

I guess I never fully understood collegiate Halloween. Grad school sheds new light to the holiday, however. Suddenly nerdy costumes dominate, even if some are nerdy-sexy costumes. Many a student went as the organisms they study: pond scum, sea squirts, garden variety prokaryotes galore. I had friends who went as a trio of scientific journals, and a few others who went as enzymes.

For me, this year brought out neither nerdy nor sexy side. Rather, it awoke a far more dangerous facet: kleptomania.

It began innocently enough. I joked about a bright orange dress I own that makes me look like a traffic cone (albeit a nice traffic cone). The next morning there was a battered, but endearing traffic cone in front of my bedroom door in the hallway. I have fantastic roommates. We swapped it for a really pretty cone the next evening. The next thing I knew, I was clipping caution tape from an abandoned construction site at a Home Depot. It was a narrow section of the parking lot and cars were honking angrily at my friend who pulled over while I surreptitiously scuttled across the street and snipped precious yards of "CAUTION CUIDADO" repeats.

Some finds were easy. I nabbed a foot or so of the "DANGER DO NOT ENTER" red tape on the way to an interview with a professor. Yet, if I was to really pull off the costume, I needed something definitive. I wanted a cone. Not the cute dweeby cone sitting in our kitchen, although it was shiny and adorable. I wanted the cylindrical pillar-looking traffic cones. It would be the ideal cane. I would become the Gandolf of road construction--my orange stave would boom authority as I shouted "Though shalt not pass!" Or something. Hard as I looked, there were none to be found that weren't bolted to the ground.

Serendipitously, the day before Halloween, a miracle struck. I was innocently wandering to my biochemistry discussion section. There, in the grass, was a traffic pillar. MY traffic pillar. It was beaten, detached from it's heavy base, and merely relaxing in the yard. I looked around. No construction to be seen. Someone had stolen it and tired of its novelty. It was unwanted, abandoned, and alone; devalued in our careless materialistic society. I picked it up. It was perfect, fitting into my hand and lending the perfect amount of weight for a cane. It made the perfect armrest. I brought it to class. "What did you do now?" "She mugged a construction worker, clearly." My professor could only laugh when he walked in to see a bright orange pillar behind my desk.

After that there was no hope. I became a full-fledged construction paraphernalia kleptomaniac. I took one of the scores of construction signs on site at school. I found an expired 'no parking, construction zone' sign on my way home. Everywhere I saw signs and cones I could take for my costume. In short, I was drastically increasing my chances of being the first grad student in my class to quit because she was sent to jail. Why go Grand Theft Auto when you can go Grand Theft Traffic Cone?

It was glorious. I made barricades to wear. One guy kept calling me 'cuidado lady' because I wore the bilingual tape as a headband. There was just one thing spoiling a marvelous weekend. Work. This week brings a second midterm and the NSF fellowship deadline. Neither of which are particularly daunting if I was capable of working like a normal human being. Alas, I write at the whopping speed of three sentences a night. They aren't even good sentences. The fellowhsip involves three essays: personal statement, research history, and proposed project. The pitiful thing is that I only have the proposal to write! The other two essays I have already written, and I managed to win other things with them, so they can't be that bad. I can write the proposal on my current rotation project. It should be straightforward and simple. Yet... three sentences every six hours. It also looks like a peer-reviewed journal threw up in my room.

On the up side, I have gotten good at swinging at the neighborhood playground, making weird shouting noises, talking to the neighborhood cats, and creating pumpkin pie smoothies.

I love pumpkin custard. It is so creamy, perfectly spiced, and an overall reminder of the gentle decadence fall can bring. Only pumpkin pies take time! Crust takes patience and is 50% fat. I can't handle that. Instead, I now have a smoothie. It's a drinkable pumpkin pie--perfect to satisfy that sweet craving when you don't have the time to waste on a full-out pie. I like to put honey teddy grahams as I eat it, to give it some crunchy crust.

NSF, you better watch out. If I'm capable of stealing cones from the institution that pays my stipend, imagine what I'll do if you don't give me that fellowship. Needless to say, you won't get a smoothie.

Pumpkin Pie Smoothie
1 c pureed pumpkin
1/2 c vanilla lowfat or full-fat yogurt. (Recommended, mountain high)
1/2 c evaporated milk (or a healthy splash of normal milk)
pinch nutmeg, allspice, and clove
healthy pinch cinnamon
whipped cream/topping for garnish
teddy grahams.

Mix first five ingredients until homogeneous. Add dollop of cream, sprinkle a little more cinnamon, and garnish with teddy grahams. It's fun to make screaming noises as you eat the tiny bears. Or not.