Here are some random observations about Halloween:

I always enjoyed Halloween when I was a kid. Then, for about 15 years it left my consciousness as I grew up and joined the real world.

Now it's back in my head. Why? Because I have a two year old, and because I live in a neighbourhood with hundreds of children.

Here are some observations about Halloween:

* I've run out of candy 2 years in a row. Too many kids. I shut the lights off, but they still knock on the door. So I run upstairs and hide, and try to be really quiet.

* I want to give only one candy. One gum ball or one chocolate bar, but Cindy says I should give two or three candies. I guess I'm cheap.

* Those mini chocolate bars that come out around Halloween are even smaller nowadays. They're more like mini-mini bars. Seriously, now they're the size of your knuckle. The wrapping weighs more than the chocolate.

* A truck crashed into the porch of a house two streets over from ours, knocking the supporting beam down. There's yellow crime-scene tape over the house. But if you just glance, it looks like all the other houses with yellow crime-scene tape decorated for Halloween.

* There's two types of Halloween decorations: Cute (smiling pumpkins, cartoony monsters) and scary (bloody masks, knives slitting throats). I prefer the scary stuff. Mostly in my neighbourhood it's the cute stuff.

* I think grown adults who dress up for Halloween are kind of weird. I don't mean putting on a witch's hat. That's fine. I mean those adults who go way overboard with a full-blown costume.

* In my last job I started on Halloween day. Half the office was dressed up on my first day of work. They walked me around the office to introduce me to everyone. The next day people weren't dressed up anymore, and they all looked unfamiliar.

Radical honesty.

I was reading The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment by AJ Jacobs. He writes a chapter about "radical honesty" a self-improvement technique invented by Dr. Brad Blanton.

The goal is to be completely, 100% honest all the time, in every circumstance. Not only that, but you're also not supposed to filter any thoughts that come to your mind. If you glance at a woman and find her attractive you're supposed to tell her, right then and there.

Hmm. Sounds disastrous. Jacobs attempted to follow radical honesty most of the time. He reported being stressed out. A few times he just couldn't do it.

Blanton says that lying to people is cruel. If grandma makes you cookies and they taste horrible, you should be kind and tell her they taste bad. If she gets offended, that's her issue. Umm okay.

How long would it take you to lose all your friends practicing radical honesty? How would you ever date the opposite sex or remain in a relationship? How would you ever get hired and/or keep a job?

I do grant that being radically honest at work would be simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. You'd feel good for telling the truth. You'd feel great! But these "good feelings" would be overwhelmed by the sense of dread at being fired.

Clean up all the clutter!

I'm reading a book titled Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life by Gail Blanke. The idea here is that clutter makes you feel like crap. If you throw it out, you feel liberated. A pleasant side effect is that your mind also tends to clean itself up.

I'm totally into cleaning and throwing stuff out. Unfortunately, Cindy's the opposite. She's a bit of a pack rat. Last night I told her I got her a book from the library and I showed it to her. She read the title and laughed at me.

First, I'm amazed that the book is so long: 200 pages. I'm skimming it. Do I really need to read 200 pages of this? Sure, it's a good idea. But a whole book? There were 20 holds on it at the library and Amazon readers give it 4 stars. So apparently it's successful, and needed in the world.

(A side issue: I've noticed a lot of books centred around one, single, common-sensed idea. I don't think this is a great trend. Books should have tons of good and interesting ideas. But I suppose in this day and age of short attention spas, these are the kind of books demanded by consumers.)

Second, the "50 things" actually means "50 groups of things". In other words, you can't just throw out 50 CDs. That only counts as 1 thing.

Finally, I'm still amazed at how much stuff we have in our house. Specifically our basement. I can't believe that that stuff fit in our last (small) apartment in downtown Vancouver. I'm baffled.

This is my 100th post to the blog.

100 posts! And I haven't missed a day yet. I should celebrate with some kind of small, obscure personal event. Maybe when I'm driving I'llraise my arm out the window in a victory fist.

Or maybe I'll eat a forbidden and potentially dangerous, but extremely tasty piece of food.

There's a website that lists cool facts about each number. For 100 it says, "100 is the smallest square which is also the sum of 4 consecutive cubes." That doesn't sound very interesting to me.

I say 100 is a cool number because it's the first really big number you learn as a kid. Then, when you're an adult, 100 becomes a tiny, almost inconsequential number compared to some of the other numbers out there.

The biggest number in the world is a googplex, which looks like this:

10(10)(100) or Ten to the tenth power to the hundredth power. The number is so huge that there isn't enough room in the known universe to write out all the zeros. Also, the number could never be read or written because it would take more time than the age of the universe to read or write the number.

That's a big number.

But back to 100. One hundred is also cool because it's hundred times better or bigger than one. Meaning, if you just do one thing in your life, someone who does a hundred of these things is 100 times more experienced/wiser/better than you.

The self-help industry is a way to brain wash people.

A few days ago I wrote a blog post in which I proved that the self-help industry is useless. (Essentially I said if it worked, there wouldn't be any need for an industry.)

Yesterday I ordered Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich from the library. Apparently she argues that the "positive thinking movement" is a way that rich, wealthy, powerful people brainwash us.

I had never thought about it that way. If we're constantly told to stay positive and look at the bright side of things, then when we're let down or fired or abused or taken advantage of, we're not allowed to be upset.

It's the perfect scam! A corporation lays off all it's employees and says, "Don't worry, we're hiring a motivational speaker!"

The company says, "You have to stay positive! Things are going great for you! Look at the bright side!"

Positive thinking is hardly every questioned in our culture. It's just assumed that you should be doing it and you should be doing a lot of it.

If we are taught that "it's all in our mind, everything happens for a reason, you control your destiny, look on the bright side", we're taught to accept negativity and abuse.

Maybe people need to be pessimistic and angry. Maybe that will change things.