April Fooling Around
I like the idea of April Fools. I love the little internet fools that lurk, ready to spring (Gmail paper, anyone? — you can only see it if you’re signed out) I like the ones that show up on television (like the spaghetti trees that was perhaps the first April Fool’s television joke). But I don’t do them myself — in person — because, like most practical jokes, the laugh is at someone else’s expense. Someone specific. Some one person, not the whole crowd of us, all laughing sheepishly together.
One year (years and years ago) I April-fooled a good friend. I called her at college, sobbing and gasping.
What? What happened? What is it? she cried.
It’s… it’s… April Fool’s Day, I sobbed hysterically. And then stopped dead. And giggled.
She was maaaaaaad. And rightly so. I’d scared her plenty and for a moment she’d really thought something was horribly wrong with one of her best friends.
Um.
I had intended to be funny. She had been scared and was left feeling betrayed. I apologized several (million) times. But it wasn’t a minor hiccup. It took a few weeks for her to forgive me and for things to go back to being okay between us.
The learning curve in how to get along with others is sometimes slow and long, and sometimes sharp as knives. That hasn’t been my only razor-sharp lesson in how to hurt someone without meaning to. But like most of those lessons, it’s stuck. So no April Fools from me.
My husband and I switched identities this morning. The laugh was ultimately at his expense as he made ice cream for breakfast in my pink nightgown.
It can be an excuse to be silly, but you’re right, as long as someone else really doesn’t feel foolish.
I just don’t have the energy to “fool” anyone. I have a 10 year old for that.
I’ve never liked April Fool’s Day. Never saw the point, since I’m inclinded to do things that make people cry as well.
Ouch! Yeah, why is it that the times we did not at all intend to hurt someone feel worse in memory than the times we deliberately did so?
I agree. Most jokes are actually quite painful to someone else.
That was horrible, and very funny.
I called a friend in the dorm room using the outside line, and told her I was a nurse and her mother had fallen and broken her leg.
Oddly enough, she laughed for a long time.
I heard a rumor about April Fools–when the calendar switched from one to the other (roman to solstice?), anyone left celebrating the ‘old’ new year was a fool. And April 1st was the ‘old’ new year.
Pretty lame, if you ask me.