Oh, look, it's April Fools Day. Fan-tas-tic.
Sometimes, I see jokes that are actually pretty funny. Go check out Gmail's login page today, for instance. Cute, amusing, harmless. I'm all for jokes, because your short-term sense of goofiness seems to be a reasonable trade-off for my slightly longer-term sense of amusement. I'm even willing to switch sides and look like an idiot once in a while for the sake of a successful joke.
But to me, there's a crucial difference between jokes and pranks. Jokes are cerebral, a temporary brain-bending to cause some surprising new combination of neurons to fire. Pranks are physical, and are typically aimed at making the recipient feel stupid. Not goofy; stupid. Embarrassed, or self-conscious, or just... foolish.
It's amusing to me that I have such a strong feeling about this, because I was never cool enough to get pranked, growing up. I was the nerdy kid, with the big plastic-framed glasses and the almost-mullet, the slightly mismatched clothes and no idea how to get from my house to the bottom of the hill because my face was buried in a book as soon as I got in the car. I was both above and below notice for pranks; it simply didn't occur to the other kids. (I did get my fair share of name-calling and bullying, but that was an equal-opportunity sort of event, not limited to April 1st.)
As an adult, I've been careful to articulate my feelings on physical pranks to anyone within striking distance, as it were. Just, don't. I include things like uninvited snowballs and fully-clothed splashing in this category. There's a time and a place, and those are often elsewhere for me.
I don't want to completely rob my kids of the delight of a well-made joke, and have tried to help them recognize the difference between lighthearted silliness and a mean-edged prank. One year, April Fool's fell on a Saturday, Willem's day to sleep late. Before he got up, Emily very carefully stacked all of her stuffed animals up against the bedroom door so as to create a small soft avalanche when he arose. In response, Willem waited a while, and then scooped them all up and tossed them in the (dry) bathtub and sent her in "to take a bath."
So let the foolishness reign, however it floats your boat... but if your boat floats in a sea of pranks and embarrassment, I'll pass.
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