April 1st — aka "April Fools Day" — winds to a close.
I've pretty much ignored the day, choosing instead to focus on today marking the start of a new quarter: Time to close out the previous 3-month period and make some plans and goals for the second quarter.
April flowers...
I admit it, I am fairly guided by this construct we call "time.
I never liked April Fools Day, perhaps because I spent most of my life around various pretty "severe" practical jokers who felt the day was not an opportunity for a few pranks and jokes, but an opportunity to spread humiliating embarrassment and bullying on a day where they could actually get away with saying "It's just a JOKE! Don't you have a sense of humor???"
Maybe my sense of humor is lacking, but I just don't think there's anything very funny about having your bicycle thrown off a bridge into 40 feet of water "as a joke."
I also struggled to find the humor in having my school bag filled with some choice pig manure while I was playing soccer during recess... that not only stank but ruined all my books to the point of having to be replaced, along with the bag, itself.
Some kids are just... nasty.
It didn't take me very long to develop some "intense illness" every April 1st so I could give school a complete miss on that day.
In retrospect, I have gotten to thinking that the things that happened to me on April Fools' Day were weird, because I was actually a pretty lousy victim: Generally emotionless and non-reactive. Maybe the "challenge" was to see if they could get me to lose my cool.
They failed.
I only "lost it" once, while in lower and middle school... and that was not in connection with April 1st. The result was my beating the snot out of a feared school bully two grades above mine... and I kept beating on him long past the point where he'd given up and capitulated. The only thing I wanted for him (in the moment) was DEATH.
Pretty much everybody cut me a very wide path, after that. Not because I was powerful, but because I was clearly crazy.
But getting back to "a sense of humor," I guess what the years have taught me is that the things I find genuinely funny are typically "victimless." Humor that is "at the expense of" someone just hasn't ever sat well with me; nor has humiliation or injury.
But hey, that's just me.
And right now, the clock in the lower right corner of my screen reads 11:58pm and by the time I post this I'll re-emerge from my annual "hibernation." In general, April is one of my favorite months of the year because nature comes back to life... and we start gardening!
Thanks for reading, and I hope your day was a good one!
How about YOU? What kind of humor do you like? Do you think practical jokes that clearly have a "victim" are funny? Does bullying disguised as "humor" make it more acceptable? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20210402 00:12 PDT
0230/1473