Halloween

[Before this gets rolling: yes, this is a month and a half after Halloween. I thought I'd posted it, but it turns out it was under "drafts" and so now it's showing up in December. So there's that.]

I don't have a whole lot to say on the subject of radical romance and Halloween, but it does inspire a story that JUST MIGHT have to do with gender relations and how we view relationships and all those delicious tidbits.

A few days before Halloween, a girl asked me out at my work. Something I was completely not expecting. I was pleased and excited (obviously!) but it did make me think of this class. Is that sad? Maybe.

It brought into perspective the traditional role of relationships. The man asks the woman out, he pays for the date, it goes from there. We talked about this later in class and it led to an interesting discussion- in the society that we live in today, what is expected of a guy who wants to ask out a girl? Should anything be expected, really?

The girls in our class seemed pretty adamant about the importance of independence. They were all comfortable with the idea of themselves paying for their half of the date and all were open to the idea of asking out a guy if they felt like it. The guys seemed more divided on the issue; most of them were (or seemed to be, at least in my mind) somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of a women asking them out. Perhaps it's because men are used to having power; if we were viewing dating through the lens of Karl Marx, we would say that men, as the more powerful upper class, are confused and intimidated when the proletariat woman-class starts to organize and propose a whole new way of viewing dating and asking out men. Join the revolution! Overthrow the capitalist, self-serving men and usher in a new era of equality and peace...

Karl says: Peace out, ladies

It could happen.

All of this is to say I had a lovely Halloween, thank you. I ended making dinner for the lady in question (I paid for the ingredients and cooked the food, so I guess it all equals out in the end, right?) and we quite enjoyed ourselves. You could say we even bucked the societal norm because we didn't go out and party or even wear costumes. Just dinner and sparkling conversation.

Read: Marx's Communist Manifesto. Or at least some excerpts to get an idea of oppression and class struggle. Apparently it's a big deal.
Listen: Oingo Boingo. That's kind of like Halloween music, right?
Watch: A Nightmare on Elm Street. The original one. It's a little late at this point, but hey, it's a classic.