"What are you? Like, a walking window?"

A busy last week turned into a busy weekend, which turned into a busy Monday--and here we are!

The weekend was mostly dedicated to Halloween-related activities. Namely, parties.

The MBA student organization had its Halloween bash on Friday night. It was held in a hotel on the Capitol Square, in a bar area overlooking the Capitol building. It was a good party--music, free pizza and beer--and there were some great costumes on display. Really, I was tremendously impressed by the creativity and dedication that went into some of those get-ups. Evan and I had planned to dress as The Walrus and the Carpenter, from Through the Looking Glass, but we ran out of time to get the necessary bits together. On top of that, Evan got home from an MBA-related competition in Michigan at 8:30 on the night of the party, and we had to throw something together at the last moment. Inspired by the fact that Evan won a nice chunk of money at this competition, we decided to dress up as "The 1%." Evan with his hair slicked back, wearing a suit, suspenders, and a tie clip; me in my black cocktail dress wearing all my pearls and my mink cape. We were definitely the classiest couple at the party. That makes the photos of us holding red plastic tumblers even more awesome.

We spent all of Saturday preparing our next set of costumes: Sydney Carton and Madame Dufarge from A Tale of Two Cities.  I won't even attempt to describe those. Just look:

Those costumes took us to a house party thrown by one of the guys in Evan's center. It was also a good party. We ended up leaving around 11:30 with a group of people who were headed down to State Street for the big Freakfest party. We went along for the walk, intending to find something to eat. We left them at the gates (paying $12 to access a street one can walk on any other day for free) and began to make our way home. Somehow that resulted in the two of us walking down Langdon St., aka Madison's Frat Row. At midnight. The night of Freakfest. =:oO For the first ten minutes or so, the drunken antics were amusing. Really, a couple hundred drunken revelers in costume should provide some entertainment value. After we'd been walking for a while, though, the obnoxious caterwauling and profane screaming started to get to me. It was one of those situations where I wanted to go up to every cop (the stand-ins for grown-ups) stationed at the corners and say, "Just so you know, I'm NOT one of them!" It was amusing, too, to see how many passers-by were genuinely delighted to be able to demonstrate that they recognized a guillotine. And then there were the people who had no idea, but felt compelled to yell at us anyway. My costume got some comments too, most notably the jerks walking a ways behind us who were yelling for the "pirate chick" to turn around, and then called me a choice name when I ignored them. Like I indicated before, it's all amusing until it becomes embarrassing for the entire human race.