Art is nothing but meaningless crap!

As this week begins, I am hoping you will all be regaling each other with great stories of your April Fools’ Day pranks. With that in mind, I have my own to tell you.\nThis past Sunday afternoon, I wrote a false Facebook message to my friend Whitney, in which I confessed my romantic feelings for her. I received a standard rejection reply of, “Well, there’s just a lot on my mind lately, so I can’t really devote much time to dating right now. But it isn’t anything wrong with you, it’s me.”\nAny normal person would’ve dropped the April Fools bomb then and there. But oh no, I had bigger plans.\nIn a twist of the plot, I had asked her not to tell my roommate, Curtis, anything I had told her, because he had feelings for her as well. This meant that I was not able to express them to her. Once I received the rejection, the stage was set for drama, as I knew Whitney was upstairs with our secret agent, Melissa. I called Melissa, frantically begging her to come to my room because I needed to speak with her. Once off the phone, Melissa told Whitney she had to see me because I was upset over the whole rejection thing.\nMeanwhile, Curtis called Whitney’s phone with a frantic plea for her to completely disregard everything I had told her in the message and not believe a word I had said before hanging up on her. Then, Melissa followed this by giving Whitney a call herself to ask her if she had told Curtis about my confession. When Whitney insisted she hadn’t, Melissa informed her that somehow Curtis had found out about what I said to Whitney and that he had gotten extremely violent with me. Melissa then asked a completely reluctant Whitney to come to the room to help us find Curtis. It is at this point that upon Whitney’s arrival, the three of us revealed our intricate prank to her.\nNow, I know that you’re entertained by this story, but now that it’s over, I bet you’re wondering: What in the hell does this have anything to do with art?\nWell, if you take a look at the fundamentals of April Fools’ Day, you can see it is an event that allows people to lie and be a complete fake to everyone around them and justify it. For once a year, everyone is an actor in his or her own theater.\nIf you can learn anything from theater, it is that every person in the human race learns to be a human by mimicking others and, later, acting a certain way to achieve a certain goal. Throughout the entire day, everyone performs a series of actions with a super-objective and a subtext. We rarely say what we mean, and our goals are only one of many that help us achieve a larger objective.\nIf you saw this past week’s IU theater and drama department’s production of the play “Big Love,” you certainly know what I mean when I say we are just a bunch of ants wandering around not knowing what to do most of the time. We don’t know who we are in relation to other humans, and that lack of knowledge would certainly result in dangerous effects if we didn’t put on the mask and play the game.\nHence, April Fools’ Day comes around once a year, and we are encouraged to openly trick people and bring the game to the next level. Is it bad to do this? No. It is merely an expression of art that we bring out from internal desires and goals. We are all actors, and life is a fun, unpredictable stage.