Your Halloweekend Will Suck

by Zane Goins

Oh, you thought that last weekend was Halloweekend? You thought that your shame and misery were now mercifully behind you? You peeled off your wet, clinging costume and shoved it into a corner of your dorm room, didn’t you? You breathed into and out of your mouth in bed while you attempted to ward off the spins. This went on for about half an hour before you finally gave up and scurried to the bathroom to find it mercifully empty. The morning after you crawled out of bed, put an ugly baseball cap on, and heaved yourself across campus to ingest the driest brunch eggs you will ever have.

I also bet that your costume would have remained disgustingly semi-hidden until you had the foresight to throw it away before entertaining a guest while your roommate is away for the weekend. Well, too bad for you dorm-dwellers and freshmen alike, you need to take out that very low effort, possibly puke-stained affront to God and do it all over again this upcoming weekend.

To give you a piece of advice now, your best bet for cleaning will probably be an overnight soak followed by a vigorous hand washing in the industrial sink found in some of the campus laundry rooms. Just call your parents -- say that you dropped some awful mixture of foods onto your favorite white shirt -- and they will be able to walk you through cleaning it. Keep in mind, these poor parents will know exactly what the context behind the call is. You’re not fooling anyone, them included.

College students seem to have this unending fascination with seeing just how long the Halloween holiday can be stretched before we all become violently ill. I don’t mean this in a drinking-yourself-to-being-on-your-knees-in-a-shared-dorm-bathroom kind of ill, although this has most likely already happened to you in service of this sacred holiday. No, I mean the constant pounding that all of your immune systems will take that will result in that one person on your floor giving everyone else strep even though they promised they were totally over it.

This will coincide with being in uncomfortable proximity to hundreds of people as you attempt to get to the basement bar of that very moist frat house. This weekend will most likely end with you all being quite sick with another dreaded “freshman plague” that will rip through campus housing like your posse ripping through that box of Truly's.

I cannot tell you about my personal experience as a freshman going to Halloweekend and having a whirlwind of debauchery and delinquency, because as far as I remember I was home in my dorm room watching reruns of Halloween episodes of 90s cartoons. Yeah, I’m pretty positive that’s how my weekend went. If I did just so happen to have a caveat to share with you about a Halloweekend experience, I might tell you about how you will most likely end up standing in a corner with a trash bag for a wall behind you.

I might tell you that there will, somehow, still be skinny freshman guys wearing problematic costumes no matter where you end up. I can tell you that the music will undoubtedly suck in whatever den of iniquity you happen to find yourself in.

Finally, I would tell you to embrace the chaos and roll with the punches this weekend. There is, unfortunately, no fix to the weekend’s rollercoaster of highs and lows, and what are you going to do instead? Stay in like a loser?