My Ghosts from Teenage Halloweens Past

They’re he-e-e-e-ere: plastic pumpkins with an upright hand in the center of each, gauze draped over signs, witches and spiders and orange and black everywhere. One store had small bags with designs for trick-or-treating.

Holiday creep season is here. A few supermarkets dedicated the center of an entire aisle to candy and decorations.

Thursday afternoon I was doing errands and stopped in the supermarket for a few things. One wall was lined with rows of candy, stickers and decorated trick-or-treating bags for the little ones.

When I was in junior high, friends and I would each take an old pillowcase and head out to collect the night’s candy. It was easier to carry than a bag with handles.

We lived in a complex of apartment buildings, and the lobby of every building had someone stationed there to let in trick-or-treaters. Then we’d go from floor to floor and do our thing.

People who weren’t home would usually leave a bowl of candy by the door. We loved those ‘take all you want’ signs.

Silly String ™ and Crazy Foam ™ or Reddi-Whip ™ were our props. These were necessary to fend off older kids who might surprise us. They sometimes did.

One of those surprises, a telltale piece of egg white, remained affixed to the side of our building for decades. The thrower of said egg remains unknown, yet I can see it if I look sideways from the terrace, a permanent reminder of Halloween past.

Then there was the other side of Halloween: a no-holds-barred candy event because the next day was a new month, the start of a new diet.

For a heavy teenager who wore pants from the local Army-Navy store because they fit, it was a chance to overindulge. I told myself I would never eat sweets again.

That didn’t work out so well.

November brought Thanksgiving and celebrations with family, and then came December and more holidays. So my best friend and I decided New Year’s Day was the day for resolutions. We were seniors in high school.

She succeeded yet despite my best intention, well, you can guess. It took an acceptance letter to college the following month to motivate me once and for all.

By graduation I was minus 30 pounds and feeling better about myself. My motivation to lose the remaining 30 pounds during freshman year while going to parties, including at Halloween, was the boy next door.

He was two years older, and I had a crush on him all through high school. While still shy, I was no longer the heavy teenager from the school bus stop. That’s for another post.

Losing weight was one of my most difficult teenage challenges.

– – – – –

This past Thursday at the aforementioned store I looked for a chocolate bar. One of my favorites was on sale two for $3.

It was a regular size; the wrapper said 200 calories, though anything up 250 calories is fair game. I only wanted one and always check labels, a habit that will remain with me forever.

High school was a long time ago yet now and then I feel like the shy teenager, albeit thin, from the school bus stop.

I’d like to know what you think.

Copyright © Janie Rosman and Kaleidoscope Eyes 2026

Where Did the Accountability Go?

Photo by chris robert on Unsplash

If I had to name one thing that got to me out of every atrocious, insulting, condescending, demeaning and more thing he said, then it would be that clip. I was furious when I saw it. How dare he? I won’t dignify what he said.

He turned our closest allies against us, started foolish trade wars and spends his time cozying up to tyrants. Everything on his agenda seems designed to weaken us at home and isolate us abroad.

Has he so few real responsibilities that he probably gets up in the morning and decides what he’s going to ruin next?

Besides the White House, its grounds and landscaping, the Oval Office and the entire District, he’s doing his best to destroy our Constitution, our 250-year-old country, our freedom of speech, our voting rights and anything else on his personal to-do list.

They’re distractions from the real issues. Last night I was watching cable news and was disappointed that anchor after anchor repeated the same news. A different way.

He wants that. He wants the endless, repetitive distraction.

If the media did its job and ignored these distractions, then they would eventually leave the news cycle.

I blame the Republicans in Congress and especially the Supreme Court for looking the other way and for refusing to hold him accountable or limiting executive overreach. Instead of supporting and defending the Constitution, they protect their political careers and are complicit in this ongoing disaster.

As an election inspector, I see how our system works from the inside. Our elections are free, fair and secure. He votes by mail while attacking the process and trying to make us doubt the results.

The 2000 election was down to the wire with hanging chads in Florida. What a mess. After a fierce legal battle, Al Gore conceded to George W. Bush and told the nation, in part:

”Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

That’s how leaders behave. We are a laughingstock to the rest of the world. He treats our country like his personal demolition derby.

The ongoing standoff with the arts community sounds and looks like a childish jealous rage, a temper tantrum gone awry. He threatened to destroy The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts over a naming dispute and a desperate obsession with personal branding.

I can’t wait until his insecurities and petty grievances are scrubbed, removed, bulldozed and demolished. From everywhere.

Early voting is underway in many states. Election Day is November 3. VOTE.

I’d like to know what you think.

Copyright © Janie Rosman and Kaleidoscope Eyes 2026

Cutting Corners with A.I.-Generated Misconduct

Credit: Library Books – World Book by Nataev, used under CC BY-SA 3.0

We didn’t know about Artificial Intelligence when I was growing up. My go-to reference was The World Book Encyclopedia, a set of cream and dark green books embossed with gold.

I learned A, E, I, O, U and Y are the vowels in the alphabet.

Science was interesting yet was not my best subject — like art, it made sense only when I was in class listening to the teacher explain things — so I checked information more often there than in my textbooks.

Cheating meant copying word for word from its pages or from textbooks or other printed work. The teacher could tell if someone did that.

Numerous recent articles in The New York Times discuss A.I. and cheating. Here are two:

• Reporter Dana Goldstein wrote in “Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era” that schools are losing a costly “detection arms race” as students use tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to bypass A.I. detectors.
• Goldstein and reporter Alan Blinder noted in “A.I. Agents Are Taking Entire Online Courses for Cheating Students” that tech-enabled cheating threatens online courses, citing adjunct professor Dr. Edward Gray’s warning that A.I. essays give themselves away by adding extraneous sources.

Tech-enabled cheating isn’t just an abstract threat; it’s actively shifting how educators measure intelligence.

I was reminded of a post by an educator who asked how we know what students are thinking. The educator watched a student generate a literary analysis in seconds and said most teachers would have considered it strong work.

The student paused when asked what makes that interpretation more convincing than others. It was not known if the student created the work, which is the most important question here.

If you don’t know how you arrived at an answer, if you are unable to defend your result, then how do you know it’s more convincing than other answers?

I studied literature. It takes time to analyze.

For fun and out of curiosity, I pasted some of my published articles into ChatGPT and Gemini to see if A.I. could find the soul between the words. I really was curious.

Among other things, A.I. told me it made my writing ‘clearer, faster and more structurally sound.’ Faster? Than who? Those articles passed two levels of human editorial eyes before they appeared in print. A.I. doesn’t truly understand a ‘voice.’

It operates in a T9-like sphere — guessing the next word based on a blueprint of statistics, a high-speed flip phone trying to finish my thoughts for me.

A.I. can never be me, the person behind the ideas, recreate my experience writing the articles or know why specific topics mattered. A.I. couldn’t tell you why I got up at 1 a.m. to write what was on my mind.

What stopped me was the structurally sound part: it organizes messy, scattered thoughts.

Writing is messy. It’s not a linear or sequential process, per the first of Colorado Department of Education’s 10 Reading, Writing and Communicating Principles.

I think differently when writing with a pen on a pad than I do when typing. And I love reconstructing sentences until I get the phrase(s) that best describe(s) my thoughts.

There are far more A.I. programs out there; I chose ChatGPT and Gemini. Both told me A.I. can identify a person’s face and aspects of tone of voice yet cannot replicate the internal experience of perceiving (as humans understand it) or know why someone looks tired from staying up all night reading.

The human perspective, as we understand it, cannot be programmed. Treat A.I. output as a draft, verify and cross-reference the information you receive, and use your own judgment.

I’d like to know what you think.

Copyright © Janie Rosman and Kaleidoscope Eyes 2026