Loosely Talking: April Fools

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about – Oscar Wilde. 

Hello! Welcome to our fifth issue of Loosely Talking, where we reflect on our lives between the cobblestones. 

Welcome to April! What better way to kick it off than with a celebration that demands no budget, no family dinner, no formal outlet. All you need is a little sense of humor and some imagination to make someone's day a little brighter or worse… April Fools' Day is our kind of celebration. For this edition though, we will spare you the terrible jokes. 

Indeed, it seems as if jokes are not only a surrounding figure of speech, but within us as well. We prank ourselves into believing this time we will attend the 8:30 lecture and start the paper a couple of weeks before the deadline. And yet, even after three years, we still find ourselves skipping our alarms and starting the paper on its due day. The university has its way of constantly pranking us. 

There is nothing better than when you get that horrifying message from the Board of Examiners, delivering such atrocious news about your schedule or credits, you can’t help but feel like you’re being pranked. Other times when you’re stuck in a group project with people who ignore your messages, the work, or any responsibility. Isn’t that fun! 

Our personal favorite is when you walk into your first lecture of a brand new period only to find your ex-partner sitting next to the last free seat in the room!!!

All jokes aside, we think there is something quite liberating about a day allowing us not to take things too seriously. Even though it is not an immensely celebrated holiday, April 1 is a small, collective permission slip to laugh at the absurdity of it all: the readings, the group projects, the friends, the pressure to have a five-year plan at twenty-one.

So we hope that today, dear reader, you play a prank. Or don't. But at least let yourself find the joke in it all. Because if the last few years of our time in Maastricht have taught us anything, it's that the cobblestones are a lot easier to navigate with a pinch of salt

April on,

Celia and Ella