#141. Halloween Without the Girl (Saturday, November 2, 2013)

What was your best day…of enjoying a day because of the absence of someone?

So far, amid 139 total entries, we’ve had one story about the one girlfriend I ever had—two weeks before she became my girlfriend. And then finally, just a few short entries earlier, the story that ended with her becoming my girlfriend. Now, we finally have a story with some relevance to Chenling that took place while we were together.

But as the title would suggest, relevance does not mean presence. And as you could probably surmise (from the title and how I’ve been characterizing the relationship), it’s actually the absence that makes this day what it is.

Because, normally I hate Halloween (despite it being the date of multiple career successes, #114, #109)—specifically the adult treatment (#115) of the holiday that come with it. It’s the combination of being a holiday inherently about putting on disguises and becoming someone you’re not, with the co-opting of an innocent child sugar-acquisition expedition into another adult social game—who got invited to which exclusive party, who’s in a relationship with who as shown by their cheesy couples costumes, who dressed the best like it matters at all.

A lot of that was likely because I had never actually been invited to Halloween party until this one—hosted by Jenna from my Master’s program, with about fifty or sixty grad students (from our program and others) there at its peak.

Chenling was not one of them, as she was very stressed with classes at the time. And so, much like that night in Chapel Hill (#87, but turned up since she now was my girlfriend and without the ending fire panic), drinking and socializing continuously with old and new people while knowing your social life was developing elsewhere, this absence created a confidence and ease of speech and movement that gave the whole night a fixed elevated positivity.

Besides that special qualifier, and the typical Duke party vibe I’ve already described in way too much detail already (#67, #60, #51), a few other notes:

I distinctly recall one very good and extended conversation with one of Jenna’s roommate’s colleagues who was a psychology grad student¹; it may have been distorted by the Chenling context, but I could feel a real signal of interest there (not common with me).
As for my costume, of course I was committed to putting zero effort into it. But I technically needed one. So I just threw on my St. Louis Cardinals cap² and called myself a baseball player. And that’s what I told everybody, with no shame whatsoever. (It did become a relevant conversation-starter later that night, when the Cardinals walked off Game 3 of the World Series against the Red Sox on a controversial obstruction call.)
The top costume had to be Walter (of the gold course misadventures, #81), who was wearing this giant dice cube he had made himself. He told me it took him four hours, and I asked if he made sure the opposite sides added up to seven. (He told me did; otherwise, it would’ve been the biggest waste of four hours that was humanly possible.)
My good buddy Chun-Keong (CK, #87) had to get home early, so I lent him some cash—twenty dollars or so—to take the taxi back because he had left him wallet at home. He then texts me thirty minutes later: “Twenty dollars doesn’t even get me halfway there, can you believe it?” (I never found out how he ended up funding the rest of his trip, or what kind of routes the cab driver was driving.)

I had been to many, many parties in grad school without a girl (practically all of them). But this one was my first one without the girl. And just that one made enough of a difference.

Assisted by my own more-than-casual interest in the subject. During that useless summer I had before starting high school (#10), I (properly) read the entirety of Davis and Palladino’s 800-page psychology textbook.
Which I had randomly acquired at a Lids at the Philadelphia Premium Outlets a few summers ago during my family’s New York trip (#52). I figured it was too cliché to just get a Jays cap. Why the Cardinals, though, remains a mystery (though they did feature prominently in #103). Still, it’s lasted longer than any apparel I’ve acquired: as of sixteen years later, we still have the cap and my dad wears it regularly. (Which does mean I actually only need 29 caps to complete the full collection, #129).