Halloween Sadness

Halloween is a time for the spooky, the scary, sometimes the terrifying and maybe a bit of the downright goofy. Is there room in there for a bit of Halloween sadness?

Two years ago one of my friends, Will, moved away from the Bay Area to pursue an MBA from Chicago Booth. We were all very proud of Will and wished him the best of luck. Two years later, he's graduated! But now he's moved to Berlin.

Will used to throw pretty extravagant, costume-required, Halloween parties. He and his friends were very into cosplay in general and would have costume parties throughout the year, for birthdays and other occasions. But Halloween, now there was a chance to get schmucks like me and a few of his other friends to be forced to wear a costume. Legend has it that if you showed up to one of these parties without a costume, you would be assigned a "loaner" from the rejected costume pile. And no one wanted that.

Is there room in Halloween for sadness? For the past two years, some of Will's friends and I haven't celebrated Halloween at all. We had no party to go to, no celebration. We had no reason to eek out the smallest semblance of a costume and hope it passed muster. Can you be nostalgic for something that happened 2 years ago?

It's just one more thing that reminds me that today, right now, the time we are currently living, will one day be looked back upon as the good old days. So put on your best costume, even if it's just "The Color Red".