Why I'm Depressed on April Fools' Day

I'm a clever, funny person, but my attempt to come up with a creative, original April Fools' Day article has left me feeling very unclever and very unfunny. (The good news is, if you think I'm NOT clever or funny, I can pretend that I wasn't serious when I wrote that. I'm a clever, funny person-April Fools!) Here are all my April Fools' Day article ideas that I shot down. I hope you loathe them all and send me hate mail (April Fools!).

I considered writing a short story about a teenager named "April Fool," beginning with the line, "April Fool was seventeen years old when she discovered she had the power to make people laugh." What a crap bomb that would have been!

Then I considered writing out directions for how to play an awesome April Fools' Day joke on my husband--but why would you want to play an awesome April Fools' Day joke on him? You don't even know him! (I'll tell you something about my husband, though: If you do decide to play a practical joke on him, don't give him one of those fake, winning lottery tickets. He WILL kill you. You've been warned.)

I thought I might list various AC-centric April Fools' Day jokes. For example, wouldn't it be hilarious if AC upped all our page view numbers to one million just for April Fools' Day? All of the writers here who already have over a million page views would be horrified. Someone would start a new thread in the AC forums entitled "Major errors in recent PV update! My PVs dropped down to a measly one million! WTF?!" Meanwhile, all the rest of us would pee our pants with joy. We'd all anxiously click on the "My Content" tab to find out which little gem of ours had suddenly, unexpectedly set the internet on fire. I bet it's my article on how to make a pillow out of human nose hair!...I can't believe 995,000 people decided to read my haiku about clouds and consciousness!...I guess all those weirdos following me on Twitter really ARE clicking on all the links I post! When "My Content" finally loads, we'd be greeted with this message: "April Fools! You'll never get to one million page views on Associated Content, dumbass! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!" Classic.

All of my other AC-centric April Fools' Day joke ideas pale in comparison to that one-million-page-views-for-every-AC-Source humdinger. We could all go around leaving obnoxious comments on serious AC articles as an April Fools' Day joke (but some of us do that every day). Should we assume that everyone who comments "Nice article" on April Fools' Day is, in fact, insulting us? See, this is why it's hard to enjoy April Fools' Day--not everyone is celebrating! I think it'd be loads of fun to run around AC, commenting "Nice article (smiley, smiley, wink, wink)!" or "Brilliant article!" on articles that are NOT nice or brilliant in the least, but most people wouldn't get the joke.

"How about you write 'April Fools' Day' backwards? Make that the title of your article!" my muse said to me, after I'd scrapped the AC-centric April Fools' Day joke ideas and decided my article needed to appeal to a broader audience. My muse was incredibly excited by this idea, and so was I, until I googled "Yad Sloof Lirpa" and discovered that my muse is stealing ideas from other people's muses. There are "Yad Sloof Lirpa" T-shirts, for crying out loud! Darn it! I thought I was so clever. Turns out I'd merely tapped into the collective consciousness for a second and pulled out a cheesy, secondhand idea. (No way am I going to buy one of those "Yad Sloof Lirpa" T-shirts at Cafe Press, even if it is made with organic cotton!)

Why can't I come up with an original idea for an April Fools' Day article? Of course I considered writing a "serious" article--"My Infected Ingrown Toenail"--which would gradually turn more and more ridiculous (how much pus will my infected ingrown toenail ooze?), until, finally, I'd be forced to type "APRIL FOOLS!" But I don't have to google it to know that hundreds of writers have already done that. I don't want to be like hundreds of other writers! I gotta be ME!

I'm starting to think that in order to be me, I have to be like thousands of other people, even on April Fools' Day, when I should be smearing boogers on something or pretending to quit my job or updating my Facebook status to read "Maria Roth has just agreed to marry Johnny Depp!"

So that's why I'm depressed on April Fools' Day. Because I've realized that I'll never be as funny or clever as a stupid-T-shirt designer. Somebody shoot me now. (!Yad Sloof Lirpa Yppah)