The Geeky Asian Guy Blog

Another Halloween, another dreaded decision — what costume should I wear?

Here are some general observations, in no particular order:

1. If you are good-looking and/or super-cool, you can wear any costume you want — heck, you could wear a Hefty garbage bag over ratty underwear and still hook up with the hottie wearing the naughty nurse costume.
2. The correlative of No. 1 is that if you are not good-looking and/or super-cool, you should not get costume ideas from good-looking and/or super-cool people.
3. Avoid any costumes that have an ethnic component (martial arts dude, Buddhist monk, Confucius) unless you want people to be offended and to feel sorry for you at the same time.
4. For the love of God, don’t even think of going as Mr. Sulu, Bruce Lee, or a Transformer.  (I knew a guy who spent hours on a homemade Gandalf costume.  99% of the people he ran into had no idea who Gandalf was, and the other 1% told him that his costume sucked.)
5. I knew one guy who covered himself, head to toe, with peanut butter.  He said he was a turd.  Don’t do that.
6. Dressing as a doctor was only cute when you were five years old, and not yet a disappointment to your parents.
7. Don’t go for clever — it will only puzzle people or piss them off when they conclude (correctly) that you think that you’re smarter than they are.  Example of a clever costume: covering yourself with feathers, and then telling everyone that you’re Hope.  (Take that, you English majors!)
8. Don’t dress as a woman — no one is going to believe that you’re doing it just for Halloween.
9. Same goes for any costume involving a diaper.
10. Don’t dress like a mummy — every few years you hear about some guy dressed as a mummy who catches fire.  And he probably didn’t even look that much like a mummy before he got too close to the jack o’ lantern.
11. Don’t fake a hanging.  True story — some guy died, even though he was wearing a protective harness, because his chest was too constricted for him to breathe.  No one around him knew that he was in distress until it was way too late.
12. Don’t even think of doing anything with a gun and blanks.  At close range, blanks are like 99% percent as dangerous as real bullets.
13. The only thing worse than a bad costume is no costume.  Unless, of course, your object is to further distance yourself from human contact.

Some reasonable costumes:

1. Zombie — especially if you can figure out some way to make a realistic looking head wound.
2. Vampire — but only if you can get some high-quality fangs, and cat’s eye contact lenses.
3. Death — wear all black and paint your face white.  (Of course, there’s some danger people will think you were going for Yoko Ono.)

Tags: Costume, Halloween

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Advice & How To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.