Now you didn't really think I was going to let April Fool's Day pass by without mention, did you? I, with my incredibly overactive imagination and love of all things remotely evil cannot resist such a holiday of encouraged tomfoolery. It is one of my favorite holidays, second only to the Fourth of July - a celebration for both the birth of our nation and one of its most beloved residents, me!
But the amazing day of my birth aside, April Fool's Day is always a time to be remembered when I am around. This year I really went above and beyond. I had not one or two, but 14 different pranks to pull. It was a busy day indeed.
I could not have pulled off all these capers successfully without the assistance of my friends Kirsten and Amanda. We spent days, if not weeks, planning for the big day.
I will not go through each and every prank in this column. It would take far too long and I refuse to be responsible for multiple readers wetting themselves in class. If you're curious, you can always e-mail and I will indulge you. But now, to the fun part.
The first prank was a little rocky. We hid an alarm clock under our friends' futon and set it to go off around 12:30 a.m. Unfortunately, we chose a room whose owners have extreme anger management issues. Not only did they not laugh, they smashed the alarm clock with a hammer and turned off the power to my room so I was late for work. Not the greatest start.
But I would not be discouraged. And it was good, too, because things picked up after that.
There was the most general prank, where we traveled around the dorm giving out Oreos. If you learn anything from this column it's this: never accept food on April Fool's Day. If you do, you may receive the unexpected surprise of toothpaste-filled Oreos. At least it was a minty fresh surprise.
Then we ventured to the more specific and difficult pranks. While I distracted Kale, Kirsten and Amanda stole his giant tie-dye beanbag chairs and hid them in the elevator. Poor Tony was sent on a three-hour scavenger hunt that had no final destination. Mike's key was suspended in gelatin - I can't call it Jell-O because I bought the cheap stuff - but he found that more delicious than annoying.
Jim and Heath were TP'd, Ben got a mysterious phone call from one of his weekend make-outs saying he should be tested for herpes and Brad went to bed only to find his mattress covered in silly string and the ceiling decorated with a picture shrine of my accomplices and me.
But the pinnacle of pranks, our shining shenanigan, our ... well, something else really humorous and clever, was the letter to Evan. It tried my skills to their very limit, but we crafted a letter from the Assistant Dean of Students and created a rather respectable knock-off of an official envelope. But to see the look of shock on his face would be worth the toil.
Apparently, our friend Evan has been caught doing things of a personal nature"" in front of a large window that faces a parking lot. According to the letter, several students - many of them female - have seen his antics, and while ""rubbing one out"" is a perfectly natural occurrence, the university had to ask him to stop for the good of the student body.
Evan's rage at the news of his chronic ""choking the monkey"" being revealed set my heart aflutter.
Everything except the shards of alarm clock gouged into my foot had gone perfectly. When I lay down to sleep that night, I slept with the confidence of a job well done. That is, until the second floor of the dorm showed up at my door demanding more delicious gelatin with hidden prizes inside. It turned out to be a long night.
If you have a great euphemism for ... well, you know, e-mail Megan at mcorbett2@wisc.edu.
