April Foolishness

I came across the paradox of me today. I knew April Fools Day was coming up, and wanted to acknowledge it in some way. I am a little mischievous, and I am certainly good at working out plans.

A good prank is not so over-the-top that it is not believable, and I don’t have time for anything really elaborate, and I certainly would not want anything malicious, so I kind of thought that changing my Facebook relationship status from “single” to “engaged” would be good—simple and non-labor intensive and harmless.

I didn’t want anyone to be going on too long, and feel really fooled, so I thought I would make a status update referring to April 1st as a clue. At the same time, I didn’t want the new status and the new relationship status to appear to close together and be too obvious, so I set the status update about April 1st at midnight, right before I went to bed, and then set the new relationship status first thing in the morning.

The way I believed this would work was that people would see I was engaged, think, “Really?” and then see the status update and realize it was a prank, so this was a one-minute thing. I was so wrong.

There were a few things I didn’t think through. With people you see on a regular basis, they know to be suspicious if you are suddenly engaged when you haven’t been seeing anyone. With Facebook people can see the status who may be sincerely interested in you, but not see you enough to be automatically suspicious. Therefore, I received a flood of well wishes, and begin to feel really guilty.

I was surprised at how bad I felt. I thought I was being a little bit bratty, which is not really so unusual for me, and there is the paradox: I am a brat, but I am also very susceptible to guilt about it.

I guess I felt bad that I had squandered all that good will. Suddenly I was feeling like I was letting people down by not being engaged, because they would all really like that for me. Bad Gina. And also I fooled them, which is not nice.

This is sometimes an issue in my daily life as well. My sisters and I rip on each other (and Mom) quite a bit too. We’re not really mean, but our humor kind of is. Anyway, I’m not sure of the best way to express this, but usually I score the most points. Generally that is fun, and no one seems to feel bad about it (unless they are in a bad mood and I notice too late), but what if it is having a harmful effect on their self-esteem that even they do not realize? I guess I will just have to stick to making fun of other people—only ones who are not around.

Maybe next April Fools I should go with something more elaborate and less believable, like a series of pictures of me with the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot and things like that. We’ll see.