Surreal?

Does it count as being “surreal” to be on the street with a number of other cars that are not driving considerably faster than me?  Because it really felt surreal as I was driving home from my brother’s place tonight.  There were all these other cars on the road, and yet they weren’t particularly overtaking me.  One of the only two that passed me must have taken at least a mile to do so.  (Though the other one whished by me with the usual excessive speed.)  Considering that I always obey the speed limit, I’m usually the slowest car on the road by a huge margin, so it felt really, really strange.  Not a bad strange, mind you, but strange none the less.

Equally strange is the fact that I haven’t done any of my usual “getting ready for Halloween” things.  Normally, in October, I play some more-or-less Halloween-appropriate games.  Castlevania, usually, and/or Costume Quest for the last few years.  But this year I haven’t had time, and I haven’t touched them.  I also tend to watch seasonally appropriate movies in the latter half of October.  (Though nothing gory, because I scare easily.)  Tonight marks the first even vaguely seasonally appropriate movie I’m watching this October, and since it’s only “Ed Wood,” it’s not nearly as appropriate as some others.  (Normally, it’d be “The Addams Family” or something this close to Halloween.  I should’ve gone for “Frankenweenie” instead, but this just felt right.  Probably because I’ve been fretting about my writing lately.)

Maybe taking my cat to the vet counts as Halloween-ish, though, since he’s a black cat?

Yeah, that’s pushing it, I know.

But I think he’s going to be okay; the vet recommended mixing the new (horribly stinky) food with the old canned food, and that seems to have him eating normally again, so maybe he’ll be back to regular by next week, when his dental work is tentatively scheduled.  (Though now I’m regretting that I returned the unopened box of cans…)  Best of all, he didn’t have an accident in the car on the way home this time!

Worst of all, getting back to the Halloween theme, I still don’t know what I’m doing this year.  Ever since I got my own place, I’ve followed the unshaken policy of not being home for Halloween.  Because I don’t trust myself with all that candy, and I’m not good at talking to strangers, especially not to children.  So I usually go to my parents’ place for Halloween.  But this year my mother doesn’t want to be home for trick-or-treaters, either, because in past years they haven’t gotten many kids coming to their place, deep in a massive subdivision.  (And the weather won’t be encouraging them, either, given that the current forecast for Friday is something like a high of 45 degrees, with a low in the upper 20s.  I don’t know how many kids are going to be desperate enough for candy to want to go out in such bitter cold.  Then again, given that it’s going to be a Friday…)  So the subject of going to a movie was brought up, but there’s not much showing that my whole family wants to see.  It seemed like maybe we could  go see that Day of the Dead-styled animated picture (what’s it called, “Book of Life” or something backwards like that?)  But now it sounds like my mother (who complains bitterly about anything she considers “silly,” which these days covers almost everything that isn’t deadly serious) doesn’t want to see that.  At this point, I think I might actually end up staying home, in the dark, using the computer or the iPad or the 3DS from under my comforter so the light doesn’t leak out the window and show that I’m home.  Of all the stupid things to do on Halloween, though…