April Fool's Day is the worst day of the year.

I hate virtually all practical jokes and always have. I'm just not a practical joke type of person, and then my resentment deepened when, year after year, people would think March 31 was almost April Fool's and get me some "hilarious" gag gift. Thanks, but no thanks.


I was born congenitally gullible; practical jokes are a minefield. You know how you can say, "Hey, look! Here's 'gullible' written on the wall!" — and some people will look? I'm one of them.

This of course then became The Paradox of Gullible People: I became (and still am) totally paranoid and frequently refuse to believe what people are telling me — or if they're telling me something I don't want to hear, I refuse to believe they have my best interests at heart. And then the problem with paranoia is that every so rarely, some crazy, horrible fear proves to be spot-on, so then the paranoia bulks itself massively, feeding on this incident.


All I know is that when I was about 13, on April 1st, a few of my classmates in the gym told me, "You've got a wasp stuck in your hair!"

I refused to believe them, thinking it was another crappy April Fool's Day joke, until I finally thought I might actually feel something squirming around. I reached up to feel in my hair —


Aaaaand then I got stung by a wasp, and the day after a birthday is always a bit of a downer anyway, and honestly, there is NO worse day than April 1st, wasp or no wasp, so April can just bite me, and if my classmates hadn't tormented me constantly anyway, I might have believed them, so it's obviously all their fault.


Right?