I am a carved-out pumpkin full of melted wax

After last night's Halloween blitz, getting work done today was not made easier by futile internet searches.

I shouldn't say futile. They were incomplete. I was halfway done reading a Google Books article online, when I realized that this sentence supposedly stood on its own:

"By contrast, in the two weeks before the election, the Liberal media had"

Lo, the book sample was missing pages, and I had already skipped several, without knowing - does that reflect poorly on me or the authors? I would be writing a reading response on a chapter of this book minus pages 231, 233, 236-237, 242 and 250.

In between those pages were a lot of charts and polls; I wanted to assume I could glean the gist of the quantitative results myself, but with my concentration level, sadly no. As usual, my studying was peppered with frequent visits to YouTube to refresh the stimulating Yann Tiersen background music that I was convinced would awaken the mind I'd foreclosed on last night.

You see I stopped making payments on my mind weeks ago - vitamins? Is that Latin for something? REM? Is that something in a computer?

As for my diet, my stomach actually churns when I consume anything with high water content and coloured like a rainbow bright character.

You say you can't live off champagne, darling? Pour yourself another.

I did buy sparkling wine to complete my arrogant rich woman costume. I bought the wine from a little man at my door who sounded exactly like David Sedaris hyped on amphetamines. I had called him an hour earlier with my order for gin and Anders wine, promising myself in a footnote that I'd never run for office, lest my hijinks become public.

"My opponent, here, says she supports the bill to lengthen hours of liquor sales. Is that because she has more than once called a liquor delivery service and then shamelessly tried to trade empties to pay for them?"

(Mostly empties left by the previous tenants, generous as they were).

The man at my door was probably impressed by the strung-up skeleton that descended from the ceiling when I opened the door. It was Ian's ingenious mechanism to scare the living crap out of me when I came home for lunch Friday with other things on my mind.

Print off cover letter... eat something eggy on bread... check email... SKELETON ON MY HEAD.

The kids who came trick or treating didn't seem as impressed as me or their parents. The adults made lots of ooooos and ahhhhs; the kids looked at me skeptically and demanded to know why I was trying to scare them.

Two things baffle me on Halloween: kids who don't understand Halloween is supposed to be scary and people who don't believe in Halloween.

I asked my neighbour who suffers from arthritis whether she wanted me to help her hang a pumpkin on her porch. She said she didn't want to upset her husband. I later saw him on the street and asked whether any trick or treaters had come by. He glanced at me and scanned the street. "I don't believe in that stuff," he said.

I can see not believing in Santa. But what is there not to believe in Halloween? Is anyone really connected to Halloween's roots anymore? Isn't that why children are confused when we try to scare them? Let's face it together, Halloween is not sinister.

That being said, Halloween parties can up the ante, and surely have the greatest potential to cross the cute wire with the demonic. Conversation runs easily, everyone has two personalities, and often someone wields fake blood. Because everyone can pretend it's their alterego talking, they'll say stuff like, "Give me the fuckin glow in the dark sword, Commie," or "For conservative women, Belinda is definitely hotter than Palin, but I'd do them both."

Plus in Ottawa, you never know who will show up at your door.

I'm sure 24 Sussex got its share of MP and ambassador kids. Good on Laureen Harper for carving 200 pumpkins at 24 Sussex. Is that why I couldn't find a damn pumpkin at Sobeys Thursday or Friday? So you and the PM opened the Beauty and the Beast style gates of your property for Halloween, I'm guessing. More importantly, did you let anything out?

Anyway, if the PM and his wife have some pumpkin leftovers, I think pumpkin is a vegetable and well, you know, I 'm trying to recover those enzymes.