When we're gone

Halloween was good. We had trick-or-treaters! That was a lot of fun. There was one little guy that, after getting his candy and seeing the cats peeking out the door from the living room behind me, spun around in a circle with his arms up in the air and said, "Happy Halloween, kitties!!" I hate using this word, but he was absolutely adorable. Definitely my favorite trick-or-treater of the evening. I did notice that almost all the costumes this year were kind of slack-ass. I dunno, when I was a kid I started obsessing about what I was going to dress up as for Halloween right after my birthday, which is at the end of September. It was always an elaborate plan. I took Halloween costumes seriously!! Maybe that was just me, though. I guess I've always been kind of a freak.

Shane and Curt came to visit this past weekend, and for fun (and because we were broke and couldn't afford to go to haunted "attractions") we went to some of the creepiest places we could find. First we went to the Poinsett Bridge, which is this old stone bridge out in the middle of nowhere that's supposed to be haunted. We didn't see ghosts, but it was by far the most beautiful place we went all night. In the dark, with our flashlights off and the full moon streaming through the trees of the woods surrounding the bridge, the stream that the bridge spans chuckling quietly along, it kind of seemed like a forgotten part of Middle Earth - very peaceful, very beautiful. I could have stayed there for hours, but we were trying to scare the pants off each other, so we left and went to this huge old cemetery out in Spartanburg. We walked around there for a while and didn't see much, but then things started to get creepy. Hard to explain... both Erin and I started getting a really antsy, time-to-get-in-the-car feeling, and we headed out. Our friend Crunchy had a tape recorder with him, and after we got out of there (we were really kind of spooked) he played it back, and we heard (just before Erin and I start talking about how we want to leave) what sounded like a train whistle on the tape, right there in the graveyard with us, even though the closest train tracks to the cemetery are at least six miles away and none of us had heard any train. Creepy...

Then we went out to this old graveyard that's been forgotten and overgrown by woods... it's primarily a children's graveyard, as it was situated next to an old orphanage that burned down several decades ago. You have to go through woods to find the graves... some of them have sunken or fallen in. We've been there before and it's been incredibly creepy... the last time we went it was in the middle of the afternoon and we kept hearing the strangest sounds in the trees around us, like children giggling (no shit). But this time it was almost ethereally quiet. I kept seeing gravestones marked with things like "Gone but not forgotten" and realized that regardless of the sentiment behind those words, they were a lie... the toppled headstones, kudzu growing across graves and monuments becoming lost in the underbrush were all I needed to see to know that in time, all of us will be forgotten. It was actually really sad, instead of creepy. It makes me think that I might want to be cremated in the end, so I can be scattered and become a part of everything, instead of rotting in some hole in the ground that will eventually be forgotten and lost.

Today is All Saints' day... I'm not Catholic, but I still do appreciate a day where we remember the dead, thank them for touching our lives, and are quietly reverent on their behalf. To my loved ones that have passed on... while I'm on the earth... you will not be forgotten.

Wow, what a cheerful post. This is what happens when I just let my mind wander...

Anyway. Thanksgiving is three weeks from today, can you believe that? Thank God for four days off from work. I've realized one of the things I really miss about working at Indy is that even though my supervisor got on my nerves and there were shitty coworkers to deal with in other departments, the people in my department that worked around me (and a few others) really appreciated me, my quirky sense of humor, and the fact that I was really good at my job... every day I went to work I felt kind of like a rock star... yeah, it sounds silly when you think about a customer service rep for a lighting company feeling that way, but it really meant a lot to me to have coworkers that looked up to me for advice and direction. I don't have that here. That might change (after all, it took me almost two years to get to that point at Indy), but in the meantime, I just feel like a face in the crowd. When I get lonely and sad, though, I just remind myself that I'm making about 19% more money here than I was there. More money is good money. All money is good money. YAY MONEY! Is it worth not being a rock star to have that much more money? Yeah, it is... *sigh* Yeah, it is.