Last Halloween, 25,000 people — dressed in a variety of costumes from Minions to Game of Thrones characters to giant versions of He’s Not Here Blue Cups — interrupted their normal Monday scheduling and came together to pack Franklin Street.
This year, many of us in the Chapel Hill community will take part in the same annual Halloween ritual. And we’ll be better for it.
Yes, Halloween is weird. That’s what makes it a great party. All festivals — even the ones that aren’t mash-ups of candy and the macabre — are weird to some degree. They all overturn the self-directed trajectories of our lives and leave us in an uncanny upside-down world for a short time.
And they’re fun, of course, which is why we attend them. But the fact that Halloween will take precedence over whatever else we would have planned for our Tuesday evening is telling.
For kids, taking part in festivals makes sense: as a kid, your life is directed by other people. Holidays and festivals come as a welcome break from the forced march of the school year.
For adults who have the luck to exercise significant control over their lives, though, pressure to drop routine and take part in festivals should feel like a bit of an insult. Take me, for example. I chose where to attend college and what classes to take there. I chose to attend medical school. And as a preclinical student, I schedule a big portion of my time. So why should my normal Tuesday night plans be at all less attractive than an arbitrary end-of-October party?
They shouldn’t. Yet, the fact is my October Tuesday evening plans have generally involved studying musculoskeletal anatomy, watching an episode of Poldark while eating chicken, and reading a little nonfiction before I nix the lights at 10.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy doing all those things, and I love feeling in control over my life. While walking east on McCauley Street last spring, my friend (and fellow medical student), Kevin, and I talked about how life moves so much faster now than it did when we were kids. Before we’d reached the Global Center, we agreed that life sped up when we began to have control over how to spend most of our time — the “time flies when you’re having fun” phenomenon was at work on us.
The problem, then, isn’t that I can’t pick activities that I enjoy. It’s that I’m bad at rationally planning into my life the complex rhythm of work, socializing and novelty needed for me to thrive long-term. Poldark and poultry is a damn fine schedule for most Tuesday nights, sure, but sometimes I need society to burst into my living room with giant cue cards that say: “Go put on green make-up and goblin ears. Get reasonably sloshed. Hit the town with friends (and 25,000 other wildly-dressed people).”
