My Brother’s Halloween Party

Oh yes, well someone in the comments has asked me to tell the story of the time I ruined my brother’s Halloween party! GLAD YOU ASKED!

It was a balmy October evening in Los Angeles, and my brother and his girlfriend had been planning their Halloween party for months. My brother had made a full-body Optimus Prime costume out of cardboard and papier-mâché that was legitimately amazing, and we reminisced about the time my mom bought him the actual full-on sought-after 1983 Optimus Prime to reward him for finally saying “hi” to the principal of my school, which enraged me because I said hi to her every goddamn day and nobody was giving me an Optimus Prime. Nobody had the heart (or foresight) to point out to me that the whole reason my brother had to be coaxed with expensive toys to speak to people was because he had an overbearing, bossy, heinously-textbook-Leo older sister who literally hyperventilated whenever the center of attention shifted off of her for even one or two seconds. If there is anything I reproach my parents for with regard to my upbringing, it is the fact that they didn’t give me whippings for the way I steamrolled my brother (often literally–at one point I intentionally ran him over with my Big Wheel and he had to go to the emergency room and I was 100% unrepentant, I was like, can he stay at the emergency room forever). My mom talks a lot about how she failed us as a parent but this is the only way I really think she did. I should have been placed in an orphanage.

At any rate, my brother claims to find these stories hilarious, but I think he is just being nice because he knows how much they fill me with shame. Unbeknownst to us, the evening would present yet another opportunity for me ruin something of his, just like at his college graduation when I got into a huge screaming match with my grandfather about race. I truly do not find these anecdotes endearing, so I hope they are not coming across as me intending to be endearing. I truly would go back in time if I could and undo so many of these things. I can’t tell you how often I fantasize about it. I wish I could let a bus run over me if it would do my brother some good.

I should explain and say that this party occurred only two months into my first year of grad school, which, honestly, is a really crazy time in your life. I mean that you actually feel like you are going crazy. You don’t understand what anyone is talking about in class; but then it’s like when you go back out into the world, for example to your brother’s Halloween party, you’ve also become unable to understand what normal people are talking about too. It is like the whole world becomes this slow-mo David Lynch nightmare you have to figure out how to traverse and you no longer understand correctly how to prioritize or value anything, and everything is mystifying. So you feel alienated in both areas of your life, and confused, and you’re terrified that any minute the department is going to call you in and be like “we’re so sorry, we’ve made a terrible mistake, your application was accidentally put into the ‘yes’ pile but obviously it should have been put in the ‘no’ pile, please give us back your stipend and go away.” But then when you try to talk to people who aren’t in grad school you’re just like delivering these awful monologues about, I don’t know, golden age spanish musical comedy and its relationship with the monarchy, and it’s SO BORING not only because no one else has the background to understand what you’re talking about but also, and perhaps more crucially, because you haven’t yet learned any teaching skills or communication skills, so you aren’t even ABLE to MAKE it interesting. And you are also really trapped in a shame-spiral of constantly being like “what even is this that I’m doing, you can’t live on $18000 a year in Los Angeles, I’m a fraud, oh my god.” You feel this panic like that great scene in When Harry Met Sally when she’s sobbing hysterically. “And I’m gonna be FORTY!” “When?” “Someday!” “In EIGHT YEARS!”

So basically I decided to go to this Halloween party because I thought it would be good to get out of my basement room where I spent every night reading Kant and sobbing (exaggeration, that only happened twice). But I didn’t have a costume, and I felt really discombobulated, and so I just threw on the costume I’d worn to perform my opera several years earlier, which is this weird see-through tank-top with a dinosaur spine sewn on the back. And I went to the party. And my brother was so cute in his Optimus Prime outfit and he and his girlfriend had really gone to town on their house, the decorations were incredible, they had a keg and everything. And then all their friends showed up. And IMMEDIATELY, just making small talk, one of his friends asked me what I was doing, and I said I was getting a PhD in musicology, and he said “what’s musicology,” and probably he has never regretted asking a question more in his life, because cut to LITERALLY 20 minutes later and I am still talking, pouring sweat, apologizing for still talking, but unable to stop talking. Telling him all this made-up shit about music history, explaining my discipline while simultaneously knowing full well that I know NOTHING about my discipline. Meanwhile he goes from polite boredom to like active panic, looking around wildly for help, while everyone else who had been standing with us inched away until it was just he and I, me still wildly talking. The interaction didn’t end until a movie star my brother and I happen to be old family friends with showed up and I was like GOODBYE and went to talk to him because I could see he was going into the house and I wanted an excuse to disappear forever. And I left immediately after that and called my old man and we had a HUGE FIGHT the entire ride home that ended up lasting like a full month. And it was a horrible night that still makes me ashamed when I think of it, the end.

So I think I am exaggerating, as is my wont, when I say I “ruined” the party. I definitely ruined it for that one guy, and I definitely made a general impression of being a “crazy sister” that no one at the party would ever want to be around again. But I didn’t, like, get drunk and knock over the entire table of food or stab someone or anything like that.

In conclusion, I love my brother so much and he is a MUCH, MUCH nicer person than I am, and I feel really guilty about being such a garbage sister. I will try to make it up to him when our parents get Alzheimer’s.

I am way over caffeinated. What should I do? Crystal Vibrations is once again blasting. I need a project. I will do laundry and edit my friend’s artist statement.

I want to do tarot readings for money, do you think this is a viable alternative career for me? Email me if you want a tarot reading over email for $10. Look at me, I’m an “entrepreneur,” somebody call Thomas Friedman.

I truly despise Thomas Friedman.

MY NEMESES

– Gene Weingarten
– David Denby, although increasingly I find myself being like “good try, old boy” with him, like I think he is at least interested in learning new things, unlike
– Anthony Lane, the film critic world’s most enormous piece of shit, did you see that heinous blow job he gave to that stupid Dad Movie about the old man and beautiful beautiful Rome or whatever, JESUS
– All the NYT columnists but in particular Thomas Friedman, Ross Douthat, and David Brooks. Are there people on this earth who actually like those guys?? I wish they would all get blown up by a freak amazon drone strike CAN YOU IMAGINE THE IRONY. Capitalism at work!
– The guy who makes the Love Actually movies

I am starting to wish I had a real-life nemesis. A bunch of my colleagues have them and I am jealous. A real-life nemesis seems a more satisfying target of your emotions. Like, Anthony Lane doesn’t know who I am or care about my opinion of him, not only because he is so much more successful and powerful than me but also because I have a vagina and thus am not fully a human being whose “thoughts” (cute!) are interesting. A real nemesis would be someone you were very similar to, which would make your differences that much more infuriating. They would snap your dream job out from under your feet. You’d be up for a job and get rejected and then when you saw who got it you’d be like “OF COURSE, THAT SLY BITCH.” I guess I need to go to more conferences and try to peer review stuff, that’s how you find your nemesis.

All my so-called “nemeses” are actually just public figures I loathe and wish hardship and suffering upon, which is not the same thing. An actual nemesis is someone you have a RELATIONSHIP with.

Anyway, let me know about an email tarot reading, and also if you need any ADVICE, the advice blog has sure been quiet lately. Also let me know if you want to hear any other stories. I’ll just be here eating gingerbread and trying to get the pit stains out of my white shirts, why even buy white shirts at all???? Never again