When you're tired all the time, you have to make decisions about your priorities. Thinking up a costume, acquiring said costume, getting to parties or clubs, shouting over the noise, making small talk with those strangers who always find me at parties: these are not priorities for me. I'm tired just thinking about it, so I'm staying home and blowing it off.

I used to do the whole Halloween thing. I have a Polaroid from 1985 of my friend Albert and me in costumes and about to leave my parents' house for a party I can no longer remember. I wore a satin French maid's outfit with fishnet stockings; he was dressed as both of the guys from Miami Vice (Don Johnson's suit and no socks and Phillip Michael Thomas' skin color). I found a little rubber alligator for him and draped it over his shoulder. He kept explaining all night that he was the white guy on Miami Vice.

Free-association tangent: not that night, some other night, he got hassled for Driving While Black with me riding shotgun. He made an illegal left turn from M Street to Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, which was and perhaps still is party central in DC. Lots of bars and clubs and shops and restaurants and people. And he made this illegal left turn around midnight on a Saturday, so the cops were everywhere and just waved him over.

And he didn't have his driver's license with him. He'd left it, along with the rest of his wallet, at his girlfriend's house, where we'd been. He didn't know this until he reached for his wallet and realized it was gone. You see where this is heading, of course.

They made him get out of the car. They told me to stay where I was. They frisked him. They put him in one of the cruisers. They ran his name through their computers. One of them came over to me and wanted to know whether I was with Albert of my own free will. It was surreal. I knew this sort of thing happened. I'd read about it, heard about it, even seen it in lower doses, like dirty looks, but suddenly it was right there in my face, asking me questions.

Albert's name search turned up clean; he didn't even have a parking ticket. The car registration matched his home address from the computer. In the end, all they could do was fine him for not having his license with him, which they did, and ticket him for making an illegal left turn, which they did.

It pisses me off that every time I think about Albert, I remember that night. But you know what? That's a dumb left to make. Too much cross traffic on M Street. Which is probably why it's illegal.

Anyway. I talked to my mom earlier on the phone; she kept putting down the receiver to answer the door, then coming back and saying, "I don't get it. There were, like, no kids last year." Although I've seen kids in my building, they evidently didn't go trick-or-treating here, because no one's knocked on my door (for which I am eternally grateful, having nothing to give; here, kid, have some Cheerios).

And on a completely non-Halloween-related note: the US men's team won the silver and the US women won the bronze at the World Championships, the first time ever that both teams have medaled at Worlds. (We kicked ass and took names, baby.) The women's team gold went to Romania (for the fifth time in a row) and silver to Russia. The individual finals start tomorrow with the men's all-around.