On Being an April Fool

Or What Do Our Birthdays Say about Us, Anyway?

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“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” — Touchstone, As You Like It by William Shakespeare

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” — Attribution Unknown,¹ But Let’s Go with My Dad

I.

Every April 1st, the calendar keeps me humble by reminding me I was born a fool.

When new colleagues or friends discover I share my birthday with April Fools’ Day, they invariably ask how often I’ve been pranked in lieu of receiving a gift. They’re mostly disappointed to hear I have no good stories while others share in my relief: Yeah, I hate pranks too.

The strange thing about sharing your birthday with a holiday is your special day is forever overshadowed by a larger tradition that predates you and will exist after you; the gift that keeps on giving is a humbling reminder of your smallness.

Given our calendrical connection, I’ve tried over the years to cultivate an appreciation for April Fools’ Day, to educate myself about its origins in hopes of discovering a few factoids I could deploy the next time I found myself wrapped up in birthday smalltalk.

Unfortunately, a close look at the murky history of April Fools’ Day reveals nothing especially compelling. It is mostly inconclusive and, unsurprisingly, riddled with hoaxes.² There are several possible origin stories including a Roman equinox festival known as Hilaria or a 16th-century change from the Julian to Gregorian calendar that resulted in some stubborn Frenchmen continuing to celebrate the new year on the wrong date.

Unless you enjoy speculating about history, perhaps the best thing that can be said about April Fools’ Day is it’s a great media holiday. Being the one day on the calendar officially reserved for unabashed silliness, it’s ripe for clickbait and pranks as exemplified by infamous news stories like the BBC’s special on spaghetti harvests in Switzerland. Whereas other holidays might invite us to reflect on love, gratitude, or the sacred, April 1st reminds us to take things—including ourselves—less seriously.

What my failed attempts to enrich my perspective on April Fools’ Day have ultimately revealed to me is I’m less interested in its history or infamous pranks than I am in the broader question of how birthdays shape our identities.

Is it true, for example, as one popular astrology book, The Secret Language of Birthdays, claims, that our dates of birth can be “uncannily accurate predictors of psychological tendencies”? If nothing else, how might being born on or proximate to a specific day—a holiday, an anniversary, or a historical event (like 9/11, for example)—influence the stories we tell about ourselves or even serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Every year, as the ides, pi decimals, and leprechauns of March are slowly replaced by the bloom of spring and my birthday begins to hove into view, I find myself wondering what it means to be born on a day that celebrates fools. Even if we reject the idea birthdays have power over our personalities or our future—as I do—perhaps it’s enough to acknowledge how they can, at the very least, function as a quick prompt for self-reflection, offering up a useful terrain for digging into the specifics of our personal histories. Each birthday is an invitation to go back to the very beginning.

II.

Family lore claims my own April Fools’ Day origin story happens like this:

Mom calls and interrupts Dad at work to tell him he has to come home quick because her water broke.

Responding with frustration, he scolds her poor taste in jokes, and tells her to stop messing around (this is only slightly an overreaction on his part, he later explains, because mom is a prankster, loves getting people’s goats, as he puts it). He’s at work, can’t be getting in trouble and losing his job over some silly games. Management has really been on him lately over his low hourly production numbers, told him he needs to unload those shipping containers faster or else.

But, within minutes, dad is apologizing to mom, remorseful, and in the car speeding home because this isn’t an April Fools’ Day prank. His son is ready to prove the doctors wrong: he’s going to be born after all, something they said might never happen.

When my parents decided to expand their family—my sister was from mom’s previous marriage— it was nothing but complications. Although mom eventually got pregnant with me, the doctors warned her she was unlikely to bring the pregnancy to term and gave a high statistical percentage I’d never come screaming and crying into the world (let alone be around screaming and crying 37 years later). The facts of mom’s medical history made it clear: it was unlikely she would ever have another child.

You can imagine, then, to what great fanfare I arrived to.

Some hours after their confused exchange on the phone, I was born around 3:30 PM on a sunny Southern California afternoon at the San Dimas Community Hospital, April 1st, 1987. Within the same year, mom has a total hysterectomy.³

My parents call me a miracle baby, but the calendar knows better: I’m 100% pure knucklehead, a born fool. My mom is the miracle.

III.

The fraught circumstances surrounding my birth affirmed from an early age what a gift life is, how lucky we are to be born at all.

Growing up, I wanted to give back to my parents by being worthy of the precious gift they had given me, especially mom who risked her health to bring me into the world. Being the only child from my parents’ marriage—my father’s only son—I felt an obligation to make them proud and be a worthy successor to my dad as “man of the house,” a feeling that intensified after he was diagnosed with lung cancer when I was nine. Yet, I frequently found myself squandering the gift I had been given.

If a fool’s behavior indicates “a lack of intelligence, common sense, or good judgement” and is “someone who acts unwisely,” let’s just say the verdict is clear when applying these criteria to my life: check, check, check, and check.

I started early. When I was a toddler, I made a habit of wandering into the kitchen and placing my hands on the oven door’s glass window. And, you guessed it, the day eventually came when my Nana was preheating the oven and, irresistibly drawn to its illuminated window, I burnt my hands. Although I had been warned countless times, I needed to feel the heat for myself. I can’t think of a better anecdote to encapsulate my life. I only learned recently to stay away from things that will burn me.

I once had a friend in high school, someone who was doing much better than me socially and academically, who told me that stupid people might learn from their mistakes but smart people learn from the mistakes of others. It was clear what camp I was in, so I thought he was a real jerk for saying that.

But, in his defense, looking back at my life, it’s hard not to be gobsmacked by what appears to be a stubborn refusal to make a single wise decision. Yes, as the cliché goes, hindsight is 20/20, but the rub is that I often knew what the right decisions were or, at the very least, had the privilege of being surrounded by folks who did; yet, somehow, I always did the opposite:

Go to school, get good grades, and be the first in my family to graduate from college instead of working full-time at a grocery store? Nerds!

Save money from every paycheck instead of charging Iron Maiden concert tickets and beer on credit cards? Penny-pinchers!

Go outside instead of spending ten hours a day grinding for legendary armor in World of Warcraft? Luddites!

Eat kale and exercise instead of eating pizza and embracing a sedentary lifestyle? Choke on your wheatgrass shot you crunchy hippy!

Bearer of ugly academic transcripts, in debt, addicted to inhabiting virtual worlds, out of shape, and generally walking around as what the great Ace Ventura would undoubtedly identify as a major “La-who-za-her,” it’s been an inability to act wisely that’s often made me feel like little more than a fool. Regardless of whether immaturity, nihilism, bad habits, or all three are to blame, I’ve made an art form of acting against my best interest.

For these reasons, I’ve spent most of my life not liking myself very much, often fantasizing about waking up as someone different: disciplined, strong, scholarly, proactive, wise—someone undeniably impressive.

In moments of self-pity, when change feels impossible, when I can’t stand to look at myself in the mirror after another stupid decision, another setback, it’s easy to throw up my hands and say What does the world expect from a fool? After all, it’s written in the stars.

IV.

I think this helps explain why, as I’ve gotten older, I’m such a sucker for productivity and self-development content. Even if it’s all a bunch of propaganda—the new spirit of capitalism at work, as I imagine Boltanski and Chiapello might remind me—the reassuring maxims, actionable tips, and inspirational stories that are the bedrock of the genre have always given me hope through the promise of change. Sure, it may be false hope at times, but even false hope has value: It can help you survive long enough to discover the real help you need.

When I went back to school in my early twenties and started attending my local two-year college, much to my displeasure, I was forced to read Shakespeare. Like so many disinterested high schoolers who had been forced to stumble their way through a required reading of Romeo and Juliet—a play that, as a kid growing up in the 90s, I never stopped associating with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes—I had convinced myself the Bard was only for masochistic readers who signaled their elitism by preferring arbitrary difficulty over clarity.

A college essay I ended up writing on the gravediggers in Hamlet helpfully reminded me that the literary opinions of High School Jake were no longer to be trusted. To my great joy, Shakespeare was awash in fools, and I was soon introduced to Touchstone, Feste, and Lear’s Fool. Shakespeare and those early college classes provided a necessary reframing of what it meant to be a fool: a subversive comedian, functioning as an insightful philosopher and social critic; their outsider position equips them with a unique insight that is both sought after and viewed with suspicion. Being a fool was its own path and, although it could be a hazardous one, it was not without its virtues.

Perhaps foolishness was a necessary step to becoming wise and, having stumbled so much, I’d end up better for it rather than be forever doomed to a life of undermining myself. As literary scholar Enid Welsford reassuringly observes in her classic book The Fool: His Social and Literary History, “There is a tradition that the cap and bells sometimes cover a head not altogether devoid of common sense.” Well, thank goodness for that.

As I write these final paragraphs, I’m celebrating my 37th birthday. Thus far, my thirties have been dedicated to rehabilitating my foolishness, transforming it from vice to virtue. It’s a work in progress.

Becoming a dad, meanwhile, may have intensified my self-scrutiny but it also afforded me the opportunity to step back and give my younger self some overdue grace. After all, my parents always supported me even when I was at peak foolishness and, surely, I would do the same for my kids. So, if my folks were willing to cut me some slack, why can’t I give myself a break? I may have spent years making mistakes, but it’s this waywardness that has both humbled me and charged my thirties with a gratitude I think would have been unavailable to me had I not made so many unwise decisions throughout my life. There’s still plenty of time to make good on the gift I was given.

If nothing else, my dentist recently confirmed I can keep my wisdom teeth on account of my big mouth (his words, not mine). In other words, there’s hope for this April Fool yet.

1. Internet sleuthing points at weak links to Lincoln or Twain—I mean, what’s new?—but the most likely explanation is this represents a colloquial translation of Proverbs 17:28.

2. For example, Boston University Professor Joseph Baskin told the Associated Press that the Roman Emperor Constantine made a jester named Kugel “king for a day” who then promptly declared April 1st a day for foolishness.

3. For readers who may be wondering, I asked mom to read this section, and she gave me her blessing to share these personal details.