The Honor System

When I was working from home on Monday, I had to dig to find a blank notebook for scratch paper. I was rustling through some of my old college stuff and found my planner from my first year at Northwestern. I always like to save my old planners because they're inadvertently filled with stories--stories I never even thought to write down, but they exist in my homework assignments, my work schedules, in the notes I scribbled to myself during lectures (or notes scribbled to my friends during lectures...). Feeling nostalgic, I flipped through some of the pages. One caught my eye because of the massive amount of purple highlighter circles around the words Tell mom about S.T.D.

Let me preface this by saying I do not, nor at anytime have I had a sexually transmitted disease. Let's just remove that suspense right now. I had just quickly jotted this down in my planner after checking my mailbox and running to class. Later, I left my planner on desk while I went to work, and my roommate happened to oversee it, and circle it a million times with purple highlighter and write WHAAATTT???? underneath it. It wasn't until I came home from work later that night that my roommate confronted me.

Holly: You have an STD!?!?
Me: What? No...
Holly, shoving my planner in my face: What is this!?

I was finally able to explain to her that STD, in this case, did not mean what she thought it meant (if she had been an English major like myself, she probably would have known--there's a surprising number of these stories from English majors).

The STD I was reminding myself to tell my mother about was the International English Honor Society I was being inducted into, in the Greek system: Sigma Tau Delta.

I don't know why exactly I kept that planner, but I am glad I found that page on Monday. There's nothing like a good STD misunderstanding to start out your week.