Boo.

Shh! They can’t know I’m here. Who? The macabre beings of Halloween. The ones who are out to get me. Obviously.

I’m stepping away from Ghost on TV (there’s nothing scary about Patrick “I Love You So Much Its Scary So Let’s Hold Each Other” Swayze) to share with you my affection for Halloween “Spooky Friends” Peeps. Put them in the microwave with graham crackers and some chocolate. They’re like s’mores dressed up in costumes.

I also love Homestar Runner. I keep preparing myself for the finale this Flash-animated comictoon. I’m afraid it will be forgotten because everyone is distracted by YouTube and streaming TV episodes. Fortunately, the jibblies are back again for ‘Ween 2007.

I wish I liked Halloween. I wish it could be another one of those holidays for showing the people you love how much they mean to you. By sharing candy.

But what I’m really trying to say is “Halloween Is Scary So Let’s Hold Each Other.”

I’m going out for drinks with my roommate and her coworkers after work tomorrow night. Someone in her department is leaving for a new job, so they’re getting together to do that farewell, good luck drinks thing. The guest of honor asked everyone to bring the siblings and roommates and significant others that she’s heard so much about. I’m looking forward to it, partly because I know Caitlin’s been waiting for her chance to prove to me that some of these people really do exist, but mostly because I have a feeling that this is going to be a room I can work.

Send me out with a group of people from my own company and I’ll totally clam up. I hate being that girl who falls on the last resort topics; either talk about work, or talk about talking about work. But somehow, I always become THAT GIRL.

I basically need a fourth wall. A fourth membrane will do, if the place is crowded. With a bit of a social moat, I can’t not be charming. I’m not trying to be conceited. It’s not like I don’t have several volumes of awkward blunders in my archives, because, seriously? A greatest hits edition is in order. But the animated small talk and the repartee and the banter? I’m good at that. I have stunned my roommate with the way I nimbly impart woes and mirth to clerks at the beauty counter and gas station attendants. She tells me I was thisclose to charming my way out of our broker’s fee, although I don’t think my powers are quite that forcible.

Caitlin is excited to introduce me, finally, to the cast of characters from her office stories. She’s really excited. Like, almost as excited as she was the night we both went to the grocery store at 10PM and waited in the same line because only one register was open and the cashier was like, “are you two together?” and she spent the whole walk home wondering if that meant paying together or together together.

We still talk about that sometimes. “That woman totally mistook us for a lesbian couple!” she marvels and I’m like, “right, right, because single straight chicks never go out for pints of ice cream on Thursday nights.” She says, “that cashier looked at me with respect.” She says she felt like sort of a bad ass.

I’m going to try really hard to get her to tell that story to her coworkers at happy hour tomorrow.

Having extorted the last out of the free trial offers at every fitness center in my neighborhood, I finally became a card-holding member of the Prospect Park YMCA on the first of this month. My roommate has been working out there for most of this year while I flitted between fitness centers and dance studios in two boroughs. I was a harlot in yoga pants. And all along, the gym of my dreams was just two and a half blocks away.

There is a TV screen at every single cardio machine. And baskets full of abrasive, threadbare towels under a sign that says Towel Service. There is no juice bar, nor is there any pretension at the juice bar. Sometimes, white-haired men wearing sweatbands and heart monitors hold the door for me.

The week before I registered at the Y, I rubbed the fuzzy lining of my sneakers down through to the rubber underneath the ball of my left foot. I was visiting home for the weekend, so I considered going to this store on Route 7 where this guy, a sage of sneakers, apparently, will watch you run back and forth in front of the building, analyze your gait, and recommend running shoes based on the arch of your foot and the pressure points of your natural stride.

I drove right by the store when I imagined this shoe guru making me hoof it across the parking lot and then asking about my history with athletic footwear.

“How have you chosen your sneakers in the past?”

“Usually I go to Kohl’s and find the ones that are marked down to like, $32.99. And then I pick based on which one they have in my size, which is Pretty Big, Like, Double-Digits.”

“I see. Try this one on. It provides excellent arch support.”

“Eek, uh-uh, not those. I don’t like the yellow stripes. What do you have in pink?”

Instead, I drove to Kohl’s and found the aisle of markdowns. Just $28.99 put me in a pair of darling sneakers with lilac trim and that cushion-y bubble in the heel.

When I was a kid, I played softball for at least six years mostly because I kept hoping that my team’s t-shirts would be a better color the next season. Now that I get to pick all the colors, cute fitness apparel is totally an incentive to get to the gym. My rule is that I can’t skip two days in a row. I’ve come a long way from picking dandelions in the very far corner of the soccer field.

And when pink gym shorts aren’t enough, I fall back on peer pressure from my roommate and a touch of passive aggression. I can’t let those guys in the sweatbands outrun me.