There is a direct correlation between (and sometimes, but very rarely, betwixt) your age and the appropriateness of pulling a prank. You are born with great privilege and wide latitude with regard to what you can get away with.

Taking a whiz while some unsuspecting victim is changing your diaper, bricking in the bathtub, scribbling in crayon on the wall (this is so overdone it's downright cliché, but try telling a toddler that; insolent little curs) or playing with Daddy's lighter - there are, it seems, no boundaries when you're that young.

It's all downhill from there. The frequency and severity of this behavior is expected to decrease as time marches on. By the time you're my age, you can't even strategically plant a whoopee cushion without being regarded by your peers forever afterward as some kind of Faulknerian Idiot Man-Child.

The decline in tolerance is steady until you get to high school graduation, at which point a crossroads is reached. If you attend college, you buy yourself a solid four-year pass to continue pulling pranks unabated, although Old Man Jenkins Down the Street Who Always Yells at You To Stay the Hell Out of His Yard, Even If Only Your Freakin' Shadow is Moving Across His Grass is now strictly off limits.

Your victims must be chosen from the ranks of your classmates and the slow-moving members of the faculty and administration, and even then, only on campus. Once you've either graduated or dropped out, or if you don't even bother to attend college, Game Over.

Thankfully, during my capricious youth I managed to squeeze in a healthy amount of pranks before my number was called. Most were your garden-variety pranks, including:

    -the "Sugar in Your Gas Tank" prank

    -the "Whiz in Your Gas Tank" prank

    -the "Flash Paper in Place of Your Rolling Paper" prank

    -the "Have Ten Big Dudes Move Your Car a Couple Hundred Feet" prank

    -the "Pull Someone's Pants Down While They're Giving a Presentation on Ponce De Leon in Sixth Grade Social Studies, Who You Cannot For the Life of You Now Remember What He Did That Made Him So Important" prank

    -and many more.

However, there was a glorious time in my young life during which, it seemed to me, I committed some of the most epic and awe-inspiring pranks to ever have been executed during the span of human history: Camp.

Camp for us American youth comes in all shapes and sizes. Mine was a weekend camp that happened five times a year, and the campers were 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. The hierarchy, from top to bottom, was as follows: the camp coordinators (who ran the show), the adult staff (who did the heavy lifting), the youth staff (high school kids who mostly ignored everyone and tried to find empty rooms in which they could make out with each other), and the campers. I attended this camp as a member of the youth staff for many years.