9 minute read
Halloween
Halloween DIY: my tips and costume greats Making a costume is the perfect socially distanced activity
October has been a complete blur. It felt as though yesterday we were attending our first Zoom lectures of the year, and now Halloween is almost upon us. While I sit hunched over my computer, I realize I have not done as many things as I usually do during the Halloween season. Is COVID-19 entirely to blame? No – in fact, it’s the post-secondary workload that has kept me stuck in my room for most of the fall season. I have watched a few Halloween movies and put up a few decorations, but I haven’t gotten into the “spooky groove” like I usually do.
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For example, on any other year, my dorm would have been decked out with the latest decorations by now, and I probably would have made a trip home to help my mom finish up decorating as well. I would have been to a corn maze and a pumpkin patch, and probably hit up a few haunted houses. Most importantly, I would have made my Halloween costume by this point.
Making my Halloween costume is one of the few times in a year I can showcase my creativity. Over the past few years, I have really gone hard to make sure my costumes were legendary. Dressing up is
my favorite part of Halloween; it’s an especially excellent activity because many Halloween festivities have been canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions. Despite having Halloween from home this year, you can still make your costume and enjoy yourself. In that spirit, here are some of the characters I have dressed up as in previous years to get your creative juices flowing.
All of the following costumes were made by me. One of my best friends, Griffin, would routinely dress up alongside me, adding to the flavor of our costume dynamic. Our first-ever collaboration was inspired by a trip to the Western Development Museum in North Battleford for the “Those Were the Days” fair. Watching the steam engine conductors completely wowed me, and living in a train town, it was easy to access costume supplies. A train conductor costume was easily accessible from items from Value Village and borrowing from neighbours.
The next year I continued the dynamic costume duo with Griffin. We dressed as the characters Mr. Fredrickson and Russell from the movie Up. After scavenging Value Village and Fabricland, I had enough items
David Menidrey via Unsplash Pumpkin carving is a COVID-safe activity too! to create the outfit’s base. I then printed the iconic “Wilderness Explorer” logo and badges from the movie, and pinned them on. We even completed the look with helium balloons for a nice final touch. That year, I won my high school costume competition as well as making an appearance in Saskatoon’s Rocky Horror Picture Show costume competition. Unfortunately, we were automatically disqualified for not dressing up as a Rocky Horror character.
By far, though, the best costume I have ever pulled off was my Green Army Man costume from Toy Story. Once again, I tromped around Value Village, picking out perfect cargo attire, then spray painting everything green. It took a whopping four cans of spray paint to complete the look, and there is still a green fog on my garage floor from missing the newspaper. I finished the look by painting my face and neck green, and trust me, the words of Oscar the Grouch (“It isn’t Easy Being Green”) only speak the truth. I have never been more excited to go home and shower in my life. The photo shows the result of my work as a Green Army man, featuring Griffin as Buzz Lightyear.
Finally, my costume last year was inspired after many years of watching The Simpsons. Fictional beer mascot Duffman, a true hero and icon of the series, seemed like an excellent fit for my first year of university. After donning a blue outfit, painting the “Duff Beer” logo on a hat, shirt, and beer koozies, I was ready to rip. My white boot covers and red towel for a cape very nicely accented the look.
Many Halloween events have been canceled due to a rising number of COVID cases in Saskatchewan. So while buying a box costume is perfectly fine, making your own costume this Halloween might be a new, enjoyable, and perfectly socially distanced activity to do. It could advance your sewing skills, or maybe motivate you to buy a glue gun to keep on crafting. Regardless of what else is going on outside, you can still stay in the spirit of Halloween by hanging out in your costume for the day.
gillian massie web writer
At the end of the day, if something doesn’t work for you, toss it!
I fucking love organizing.
My assignments for the rest of the term are all in a neatly-ordered to-do list, I budget in beautiful colour-coded tables, my inbox filters work like a charm, and I know how I need to prioritize every day for the rest of this week to keep on top of my responsibilities.
I’ve led multiple organization workshops. I’m my friend group’s go-to declutterer. Spreadsheets are my happy place.
I fucking hate organizing.
My childhood was punctuated by near-daily fights over missed assignments, sloppy work and my refusal to use an agenda. My backpack was always shoved full of crumpled papers, I lost points on tests for forgetting to show my work, and I wasted time when deadlines loomed.
I was disorganized. I wasn’t trying to be, but I was – mess just seemed to happen to my life, like I was some kind of juvenile entropy magnet. And I was told, if I just tried harder, if I just cared, I could be as organized as anybody else.
But from a fairly young age, I knew that wasn’t true.
The agenda was my biggest and most consistent issue. Ever since my first day of kindergarten, when I was given my very first big plastic matte-blue daily planner to take me through the academic year, I couldn’t make it work for me.
I tried to do what we were taught to do in class, what my mom told me “every normal person” does: fill it out, use it to keep track of my assignments, organize my priorities.
But it quickly fell apart. I’d forget to use it, or I’d lose track of long-term projects until I “saw” them again on the week they were due, and the less it helped me the less I was inclined to use it.
And the worst part by a mile was that I
had no explanation for why I was failing at this “simple” task. I couldn’t justify it, even to myself. In other people’s eyes, missed deadlines and sloppy work were evidence of a moral failing, as though I were being deliberately self-stabotaging and digging my heels in specifically to irritate them. At five, six, and seven years old, I didn’t have the words to explain that this was an issue of “can’t,” not “won’t.”
So I started building in failsafes. I tried all kinds of things – most of which didn’t work – and when I found anything that did, even partly, I clung to it no matter what. My assignments went in an online to-do list. My class notes went in PowerPoint. I stopped missing as many commitments.
But I was still disorganized. An organized person would have a “normal” system, I was told, not this patchwork quilt held together by force of will and fear of failure.
So when my high school advanced English class was assigned to help middle-schoolers who had been flagged as needing extra help with their own organizational skills, I begged the teacher in charge to excuse me from the tutoring sessions.
“I’ll volunteer for anything else you want, but please don’t let me near these kids – I’m fundamentally disorganized, I’ll ruin them,” I tried to explain.
She wasn’t having it; so, off I went, determined to do the least damage I could.
And in that spirit, when the student I was paired with told me about how she struggled to use an agenda too, I wasn’t going to do what had been done for me – try to brute-force the issue and assume she wasn’t trying hard enough. Instead, I started taking her through the systems I had come up with for myself.
Suddenly, half the class was clustered around my computer, watching me build a sample to-do list for a semester’s worth of work and answering questions about my alternative methods.
And that was when the cartoon lightbulb went off above my head. I was organized! I wasn’t fundamentally incapable of keeping my life in order. Over the years, I had gotten very good at this, and I had
never even noticed because my strategies didn’t map on to any of what I had been told “organization” looked like.
For the first time, I understood something fundamental – the things that worked for my brain weren’t necessarily the things that worked for “everybody else.” And when I decided to embrace how my brain worked rather than trying to make it conform to somebody else’s framework, life got so much better.
In other words: “Organize for the brain you have, not the brain you wish you had.”
Since I gravitate to calendars, to-do
Glenn Carstens Peters via Unsplash Write! It! Down! lists, and spreadsheets – bring them on! I haven’t touched an agenda since I moved out, and good riddance to it. Since I know I prefer to complete tasks in one big “chunk” rather than dipping in and out of them, I either break my projects down in advance or budget enough time to blaze through them in one fell swoop. I have a passionate love affair with ordered lists.
And I have let this spill over into other areas of my life, too.
Without a system – or with a system in place that doesn’t come naturally to me – my living spaces always quickly devolve into piles of clutter. So, when I’m building a system to cut down on the clutter, I embrace the piles!
Right now, I have a “gym clothes pile” on the chair beside my bed and a “laundry pile” beside the door; sometimes, I add a “clean but not put away yet” pile in front of the dresser.
There’s a “currently important papers” pile on the nightstand, and an “important but not right now” pile on the desk beside the “sort through this later” pile.
It’s certainly not a catalogue-perfect minimalist aesthetic vision of a room. But it’s clean, everything has its place, and I know where my favourite black t-shirts with funky logos are kept. It’s exactly what I need it to be – and that’s what organizing should be!
And you can pry my MacGyvered, patchworked, perfect-for-me systems out of my colour-coded-spreadsheet-wielding hands.
