So. I have been gone for over a month. Leave me punishments in my tumblr ask box. (I'm being serious. I even linked it.) I literally have no good excuses.
Here's a little bit about what's been going on during my hiatus: Mostly, I've been trying to drive so I can get a license so my thirteen-year-old sister will stop making fun of me for being the only kid my age who is unable to drive. Also, I've been studying. Algebra 2 is hard, and there's a lot of it on the ACT and the SAT, both of which I am taking (including writing sections) the first week of December. No, my mother is not making me. It is self-inflicted torture. (I am also not depressed, and very well-adjusted for someone my age, thank you.)
I saw The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Twice. In two weeks. Right after it came out.
I love it so much, and if I had enough money and somebody else who would put up with me, I'd go see it again in a heartbeat, because it's the best movie in the whole wide world and Emma Watson and Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller are perfect and why is Stephen Chbolskey so awesome and why is the music so perfect and it's brilliant. (Yes I know that was a run on sentence, but I have a lot of emotions about this movie and the book, too.)
It's the second best movie that has come out this year (with Dark Night Rises in first place and Avengers coming in at a solid third, though before Perks it was in second, I admit). It feels like a John Hughes film, and we all know how awesome John Hughes is. Correct me if you think I'm wrong, but to me the movie was like what would happen if The Breakfast Club had a baby with Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Of course, as with any movie that is based on a book, READ THE BOOK FIRST. It won't take you very long because you won't be able to put it down. Then go see the movie because it's awesome and the author directed it and produced it and wrote the screenplay, so it's basically almost exactly the same as the book.
Last weekend I went to Haunted Corn Maze with my youth group. I wasn't going to go, because I had a big test in Anatomy to study for, and my sister's birthday part was on Friday, but at church all these people kept coming up to me like, "YOU SHOULD COME YOU SHOULD COME OMG IT'S THE MOST FUN YOU WILL EVER HAVE IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE PARTICIPAAAAAATE!"
And I was like, "Um, that's what you said about retreat, and it turned out to be kinda lousy...."
And they said, "THAT'S WHY THIS IS THE MOST FUN YOU WILL EVER HAAAAVE!1!!1!"
And I said, "But-"
And they said, "HERE IS YOUR PERMISSION FORM PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE FILL IT OUT EVEN THOUGH YOU'VE HAD THE SAME ADDRESS SINCE KINDERGARTEN AND WE KNOW WHO YOUR PARENTS ARE SO WE COULD PRACTICALLY FILL IT OUT FOR YOU!"
And I said, "Oh, what the heck."
And then I went into the haunted corn maze. With a group composed of five sophomore girls and one guy from my Sunday school class. So, five minutes in, we were proclaimed leaders (I somewhat reluctantly, given the number of chainsaws), and the other girls had mostly burst into tears. So then two of the girls latch onto my arm and won't let go, as if there's anything I can do to protect them from people who have signed a contract not to touch any civilians coming through the corn maze and who are carrying chainsaws that DON'T EVEN HAVE CHAINS ON THEM SO HOW COULD THEY CUT OF OUR HEADS YOU GUYS?!?
And they're both like, "I want to get out," but they won't move, and I'm stuck to them, so I start dragging them along like, "You have to walk to get out, geniuses." And then some guy jumps out with a chainsaw, and they run in to directions, and I fall, and they fall on top of me, and the long and short of it is I sprained my knee in the haunted corn maze in Chickasaw.
And the anatomy test I had to study for, which I could have been studying for that night? Yeah, I failed it.
And trick-or-treating with my little sister? Forget about it. I have to stay off of my leg as much as possible until tomorrow, which means I get to be the person who stays home and watches the Nickelodeon's midnight special while passing out candy to an infinite string of six-year-olds who couldn't come up with more creative costume ideas than a public servant or one of Disney's vast array of female rulers over small, fictitious populaces.
On the plus side, being an invalid drove me, as it so often does, to Netflix, where I discovered the awesomeness that is Supernatural. I was going to try out Once Upon a Time, but I wasn't in the mood, and then there it was, with Jared Padelecki and Jensen Ackles in all their sarcastic glory. I would marry men with those wits, provided they also had the hair, and the ability to exorcise a demon in the back of an airplane without the other 240 passengers noticing...
I hope you have noticed the motif here:
HALLOWEEN!
One of my favorite YouTubers, Cassidy Jay Tucker, was clever enough to ponder the idea of fandom haunted houses here. She listed a lot of my favorite fandoms: Doctor Who, Sherlock, Harry Potter, even Maximum Ride. As well read as she is, I was kind of surprised she didn't get this idea...
What about a Neil Gaiman-inspired Haunted House?
Seriously! It would be about the scariest thing in the world! Like, going up to it, the house or building or whatever is in a graveyard, and there's all these Man Jacks chasing you up to the house. You get in, and slam the door shut behind you, and you're leaning against it and panting and then, out of nowhere, the Other Mother shows up, and she's challenging you to a game and trying to sew buttons in your eyes, and of course, you won't have any of it, so she grabs you and throws you behind a mirror, and there you meet not the ghost children, but Shadow! And you're sitting there in a crappy hotel room, watching TV, when Lucy comes on and shows you Wednesday getting killed. And you get up to leave and go do something about it, but oh no, no you can't, because now you're in Neverwhere.
And you have to go through EVERYTHING Richard Mayhew did, with Door and Hunter and the Marquis de Caribrais being about as helpful to you as they were to him, before you can leave.
And at the end, you feel like everyone always feels at the end of one of Neil Gaiman's books which is something along the lines of this:
WHAT IS LIFE????? *bangs head against nearest hard surface* And then you go to the bookstore the next week and get another one and do it all over again.
FUN FACTS ABOUT HALLOWEEN:
1) The name is derived from the much longer name All Hallows' Eve. The Scottish shortened it to Hallowe'en, and since people are afraid of the Scottish (I mean, look at Steven Moffat), the name stuck.
2) The Celts and Irish celebrated a holiday called Samhain, a night when the believed the door to the Otherworld was open to allow fairies and dead souls to pass through to our world and pester ordinary mortals. The people would have big parties and feast, sometimes setting a place for a departed friend, in much the same way that small children request a place set at the table for their imaginary friends. Anyway, Jack-o-lanterns may come from this early branch of the holiday; in the nineteenth century, people carried carved-out turnips with lights in them, sometimes with faces carved into them as well, to protect themselves from spirits and fairies.
3) In Britain Jack-o-lanterns represented souls in purgatory, and on the night of All Hallows' Eve, children would go into graveyards and put candy in skulls. That's all pretty weird, and so these sorts of practices were discouraged in the 1600s. Conveniently, Guy Fawkes' Night became popular around that time (it's on November 5, my birthday!), and it was easy to pull the populace away from Halloween and toward a new, less creepy tradition. (Arguably, it was still pretty violent, since they went around burning effigies of the guy like it was okay, but still. Better than sending sweet little John and Jane into the graveyard at night to put a Snickers in grandpa's skull.)
4) Orange and black are associated with Halloween because orange is a color symbolizing the harvest, while black, of course, symbolizes death.
5) The Celts, from number two, who celebrated Samhain, may have been the origin of costumes as well. They wore masks so that the fairies and spirits wouldn't recognize them as they wandered the countryside.
6) The movie Halloween, made in 1978, was filmed in 21 days on a limited budget.
7) October 31st was originally the last day of the Celtic calender. Funny, nobody ever thought the world was going to end on Halloween...
8) Halloween is the second most commercially successfully holiday. No prizes for guessing the first...
9) Halloween candy sales in the U.S. annually average about 2 billion dollars. *whistles*
10) Black cats? Not so unlucky in the U.K., where it's white cats you should be watching out for.
