Resurrecting Bugs & Halloween Costume Failure

This post is in honor of this ghoulish Halloween evening…

Side note: does anyone else pronounce it “Holloween”? I need backup.

Once upon a time (last week), I was running through Bob Eden park at dusk. The sun was setting, the swamp creatures were out, and I was gasping for air during my grueling 1.5 mile run. During one gasp of oxygen, a plump (perhaps “big-boned”) flying insect made a dive straight into my windpipe. I gagged a little, coughed quite a bit, swallowed even more until that bug went down.

Now, kids, this is when the story gets scary…

I continued on my jog through the park when about 3 minutes later, I felt something crawl back up my throat. Sure enough, it was that flying bug. He resurrected his fat self and began to climb out of the throat of despair. At this point, I gagged and coughed for a solid 5 minutes before Mr. Fly gave up and died.

It was the second grossest thing that’s ever happened to me. Ask me about the first…if you dare.

Have you ever just had a terrible lapse in judgment? A failure in a social situation? A faux pas if you will? Taylor and I have. Let me tell you about it.

A group at church was having a Halloween costume party on Friday night, and Taylor and I thought it would be a great thing to go to and meet different people from our young adults class.

Costume parties are tricky, though, because you don’t want to be the ONE person who 1) doesn’t dress up, 2) goes too far with your costume, or 3) just fails miserably when trying to be funny.

We went with option 3.

Taylor came home from work and I was laying out our “nerd” costumes for the party. He was about 3/4 done with his costume when I decided I wanted to Google other costume ideas. I searched “DIY Halloween costumes” and found this:

A roller coaster car with fake legs?? That’s genius, right?

So we began constructing, and within about 30 minutes had our own roller coaster car to ride in.

We get to the people’s house where this costume party is, put on our costume, and walk up to the door. Luckily before we rang the doorbell we looked in the windows to survey the crowd. When we looked in, we saw a few older people sitting down eating dinner – uncostumed.

We immediately turn around and start walking down this neighborhood street to consider our options. While we’re frantically exiting before anyone sees us, Taylor is going, “Just act natural – play it cool!!” as if two people walking down the street in a cardboard box holding on to a broom handle with fake legs hanging off the front is normal.

Long story short, we call a girl that we know is in attendance and verify that other people are in fact wearing costumes, and have her come outside to walk us in. Since our costume was kind of wide, we had to shimmy in sideways, through the front door of people we’d never met in our lives. What happened next was best described as a walk of shame. We walked all the way into the house while everyone (mostly people we’d never met before) just stopped and looked at us. No one really laughed… just looked.

At this point, someone turns and goes, “So….what movie are y’all from?” Oh. You mean this is a themed party? Oh. The theme is your favorite movie character? Hmm.

It was an epic failure on our part. The party was fun and we played a few games, but I think I’d recommend going with a more traditional costume in the future – especially to a party full of people you don’t know. Why didn’t we stick with the nerd idea? Or maybe Spiderman? Or Dorothy? All very reliable costumes.

Here is the finished product for anyone interested:

We took our costume off about 5 seconds after entering the party, and this was Taylor taking it to the car. I promise the party wasn’t as crazy as it looks below. He didn’t actually have to carry anyone out.

Finally… a bit of creepy from the Bible.
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

Moral? Don’t mock bald men.