Last week someone came up to me and said, “J.R. just start your freakin’ column.” so without any frivolous opening, here we go.

The weather is beginning to warm up and I am noticing more and more people walking on campus. I wonder: where have all you fine people been the last couple of months? For a while there I thought I was one of the only students on this campus.

Here we are on the start of the last full month of the semester. Registration is in full swing. The guys are out cleaning up campus. We’ve got cars in Lake Laverne and everybody is getting geared up for Veishea.

But as we look forward, we tend to forget the little things that make April the great month that it is.

The month starts off with one of my favorite days of the year, April Fool’s Day. I hope yesterday you went out and glued your neighbor’s door shut, or told your parents that you were going to get a tattoo of the entire state of Iowa on your back.

Or, perhaps you told your friends that there’s a comet with a UFO behind it passing through our night sky and they should join you in packing your bags right now! (Oh wait, somebody beat us to that one).

Anyway, yesterday gave you permission to do basically anything and get away with it. I hope that each of you took full advantage of the glorious day and went around running your mouth and following everything up with a loud, “April Fool’s!”

Of course that does not get you off the hook in all occasions as I found out yesterday.

Moving on to the more depressing side of April. The dreaded day of April 15, tax day.

Oh, the dreaded day of April. A day dreaded by most people and down right feared by some.

It’s a day in which we must have pages and pages of bureaucratic red tape completed to the letter.

Each bubble must be filled in exactly, or you get a call from the IRS that says you will be arrested in a matter of hours, if you don’t fix your glaring error by paying them more money.

Some of you have already completed this monstrosity of the capitalistic system and you have even gotten a letter back that either gives you a check or says that you owe more money.

I don’t think the IRS realizes that we are college students and have much better things to worry about then when the tax thing is due.

We have important stuff to think about like trying to figure out which one of your friends glued your door shut as an April Fool’s gag or trying to figure out which cult we can get into that will not delay our projected graduation.

Maybe that stupid guy on the registration phone and the millions of ways you could kill him are plaguing your noggin.

For some it’s the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid that dogs us — how are you going to pay off your credit card bill, or even how are you going to afford to eat?

So here’s the plan: I say we just go around making bad decisions like filling out the tax forms all wrong, not paying the minimum balance on your credit card, joining a suicide cult, and then following each bad decision up with an “April Fool’s!”

Then we’ll see just how much we can milk from this thing.

---

J.R. Grant is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ohio.