April is the Cruelest Month

April is the cruelest month. And Thomas Sterns Eliot did not know the half of it.

April to me, means interruption, inefficiency and indecision. Alone in the calendar, it represents a brief period where events and circumstances conspire to keep me and almost everyone in my circle from getting things done or being particularly happy.

March may come in like a lamb and go out like a lion, but April comes in like a psychotic and then… just stays. You never know out how to dress, in April. The daily high temperature can reach well into the 70°s, but the overnight lows can dip down into the 20° range, too. So how do you dress for work in the morning—especially if you walk or bike to work? When can anyone know that it is safe to pack away the parka in the closet and the ice scrapers in the trunk? Shorts and mittens? Sign me up.

You know nobody expects anything serious from April right from the start. April First is celebrated as April Fool's Day for a reason, I'm sure.

April is when our income tax returns must be filed. I generally try to arrange my affairs in such a way as to be able to file sooner, but there have been years when I waited for official W-this or 10-that forms before I could file, which is always frustrating because those are the years, inevitably, when we are due a refund. The news isn't all bad though, because it does force us to take a good, hard look at our financial situation at least once every year and that cannot be a bad thing.

Still, it would be nice if they didn't print right on the damned booklet that it was going to take you thirty-seven hours and twenty minutes to fill out all of the necessary forms. I have heard all manner of alternatives over the years, proposals guaranteed to save us all time and money and, of course, make taxes fairer, which always manages to save their proponents some huge bag of cash while shifting the burden on to someone else. Just as I don't see how those rapid-voiced disclaimers, or how filling a TV screen with tiny 8pt type describing side-effects for one second should be legal, I don't see how a nation can compel its citizens to give up so much time while accounting for how much money they should pay in. There are, alternatives. You can pay someone a bag of money to fill out all of the forms for you. Or you can purchase a program for your computer which will ask "In plain English!" questions about your finances and populate the correct forms with the correct numbers. It all seems like too much, to me.

And at work, we are dealing with our annual performance evaluations. Here's a good three-weeks of e-mails, phone calls, meetings, navel-gazing and self-reflection, tempering conceit and self-delusion with plausible deniability and revisionist history. All of those hours that could have been spent spell-checking web pages, teaching people the secrets of Dreamweaver, learning JavaScript or user-testing some new interface design get spent instead on What I Did Last Summer essays, wrestling with the software and ultimately the heartbreak of finding out that the thing you did the best, the thing that mattered the most to you all year, the thing you think you did Nine- or Ten-work on, garners only a Two from someone a pay grade or three above you who would have to fill out a form if you got full marks.

I had a car crash in an April, and lost a sweetie in another. I had a marriage and a business both end in different Aprils. My father died during an April, too. It seems to me that there are just entirely too many opportunities to not get things done during the thirty days that April hath. Every month is filled with meetings, with telephone calls and e-mails and deadlines and all of the challenges and expectations that family and business life bring. But April seems to go out of its way to make sure that you come out of it in almost worse shape than you went in.

It's getting better, though. This year, at least, we turned the clocks ahead an hour in March, instead of waiting for April, moving that confusion and frustration ahead a month. I just hope we aren't making room for something else to come along and fill the void. Another April is coming, friends. All we can do is hold our noses (not to the grindstone—no meaningful work will be expected, remember?—just hold them) and try to get through it.