April Fools' Day is a day I both love and dread. I enjoy engaging in pranks, but I also walk carefully on this day wary of what mischief might befall me. The first April Fools' Day I remember is when my dad opened my bedroom door to tell me I didn't have to get up for school, because it was snowing outside and school was cancelled. Gullible five-year-old that I was I leapt out of bed and looked out my window only to find a sunny, spring day to greet me. And with that, after a brief moment of despair, my love affair with the most ridiculous of observances had begun.
Somehow, naively, I was under the impression that April Fools' Day had not made it as far as the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. I mean if McDonald's and Subway have not penetrated the barriers of this mountain land, why would something as obscure as April Fools' Day have entered Central Asian culture? But, of course, I was wrong. As they say, there is no fool like an old fool.
There are still a few hours left in this foolish day, and I have not yet been directly victimized, but my students have been pranking each other mercilessly, as I found out by dinner. And counter to cultural stereotypes, the women students seem to be winning the prankish wars thus far, with an ingenious scheme or two that seem to have caught their male counterparts flat-footed.
The winner of the day, probably is a student from Pakistan who seems to have begun his jokes at the crack of dawn. His April Fools' pranks aren't particularly clever--stealing people's key cards off their dinner trays when they are not looking or posting fake birthday wishes on Facebook--but what he lacks in originality he tries to make up for in volume. Perhaps, earnest educator that I am, I will sit him down one day and teach him the finer arts of pranking, but on second thought, it might be better to leave things be as the best April Fools jokers take special pleasure in turning the tables on their teachers.
While I have refrained from celebrating today and have engaged in not a single prank, I think it is because the day has lost a bit of its luster. You see, April Fools' Day doesn't seem as funny this year, because when I read the news of our great new fearless leader, it seems that we have entered a new world where every day feel like an April Fools' Day where the President engages in some bizarre activity or says something so horribly ridiculous you know it can't be true. But no one is yelling "April Fools" and then I realize, for the foreseeable future, the calendar will be stuck on April 1 and that the joke's on all of us.
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