This is how my Halloween was supposed to go:

Dr. Boyfriend and I faux-carve the letter B onto our faces and give ourselves faux black eyes a la this girl and head to his law school friend’s party down the street. We drink some punch, make a few 9th-Circuit-Court-of-Appeals-related jokes, and head home to stuff ourselves full of candy pumpkins (and maybe some candy corn, even though everyone knows it tastes entirely different) and watch loads of horror movies (but only the cheesy ones from the 80s, ‘cause otherwise I get too scared).

Instead, I went to my friend Emily’s house, where my friend Beth and I helped rip up her Little Red Riding Hood costume and cover it in blood to turn her into Little DEAD Riding Hood:

Reeeeeeeeal scary, huh?

Then a couple of her friends came over, and we all took one look at their costumes and were like, “ . . . ? . . .” But then someone said, “Oh, Royal Tenenbaums!” And it all made sense. The costumes were brilliantly done, actually, even though poor Gwyneth shrank a bit:

Then Emily’s roommate, Michelle, came out in her homemade Geico Gecko costume, and the cuteness wholeheartedly abounded:

We piled into the train at 10 so they could head off to an all-you-can-drink loft party and I could head home to . . . my sleeping boyfriend, who had to be at law school for a seminar at 8 the next morning. LAME! No party, no law jokes, and most importantly, no candy pumpkins! But at least I have this video of Michelle ravaging Emily’s costume with a gigantic kitchen knife that she seems to have absolutely no control over:

Better than all the candy pumpkins in the world.

Yeah, not really.