October 31st has historically been the date of Halloween, a holiday marked by wearing costumes to school and going door to door with your friends asking for candy. For college students, it means getting as drunk as you possibly can on a Tuesday and throwing up into a pumpkin. It can be difficult to find the line between real Halloween and Halloweekend, which is why first-year Brandon Vang ended up being the only one wearing a costume in his October 31st lecture.

“I thought there were some people dressed up as Barbies and Kens, and I was positive it was a costume, but then I realized that the ones I thought were Barbies were always blonde and the ones I thought were Kens always had muscles,” Vang said when asked for comment. “When I saw that no one else was in a Homer Simpson costume, I started to feel a little bit stupid.”

Vang was wearing a full yellow bodysuit, ping pong ball halves glued to the face for eyes, a brown beard drawn on with marker, two pieces of black yarn coming out of the top of the head for hair, jeans, and a white polo. Resourcefulness is a useful skill, especially when it comes to making Halloween costumes from scratch, but Vang’s was a detriment to others. 

“That costume scared me,” said second-year Natalie Caldwell, one of the girls Vang was convinced to be dressed as Barbie. “I support going all out for Halloween, but it was impossible to ignore. He refused to take the hood of the skin suit off the whole class. The professor even asked him, but he just wouldn’t. I think he was crying under there.” 

Vang felt even more stupid when the lecture topic turned out to be The Troubles. 

“There’s just no Halloween spirit anymore,” said Vang, as he gobbled down donuts and strangled his son. “Everybody might’ve been laughing at me today, but tonight I’ll be looked at like a God.”