Sorry it’s been a while since I posted. I’m a little burned out on health insurance reform, and that continues to be the important topic out there.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes.
Maybe when you were a kid you had creative parents. Or at least thrifty ones. A set of black sweats could with just a few accessories or trim turn into a Halloween costume for a ninja, cat, skeleton, or even a vampire. Grey sweats could be the base for a robot costume. White ones could put you on the road to being a ghost or dalmatian or angel or even Princess Leia. Add an oversized orange t-shirt? Future jack-o-lantern costume!
In addition to being relatively cheap and reusable, these costumes were warm enough for late October. It always felt dorky to have to put a winter coat on over my costume. (So, the year I went as Princess Leia outfitted for Hoth? Perfect!)
Don’t go running out to the discount store thinking I’ve just solved your costuming problem.
For some reason, the overwhelming majority of sweats available this year are already pre-adorned with silkscreens, patterns, embroidery, or other crap. Finding plain sweatshirts is harder than finding a new job this season, particularly in kids’ sizes. I’ve been to Target, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, S-Mart, you name it. My net haul is a total of one black hoodie. It was at least on sale for a mere $5.
In addition to thwarting many Halloween dreams, this poses a problem for parents whose kids are subject to uniform codes or “standard student attire” allowing only plain, solid color sweatshirts in one of several school-approved colors — over an “approved” collared shirt, of course. A quick search shows this is not uncommon, and and it is policy in at least one of the 10 largest school districts in the nation. I mention this to any sympathetic store employee I can find, but the fact is that they are limited to what corporate sends them.
I am almost desperate enough to visit one of the crafting stores.
In Closing: banks reducing lending to small businesses, ensuring that we will either all be corporate pwned and/or the Great Recession will not end anytime soon; 5 ways banks rip you off; Elizabeth Warren on preventing banks from continuing to rip you off; and making abortion illegal doesn’t even reduce how many of them happen, but access to contraception does prevent abortion. Stuff that in your so-called-pro-life pipe and smoke it: the only way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place.