Spread the... Word

I think the idea came to us the night of February 13th, 2000. It was another one of those all too familiar ‘let’s stay up far too late for our collective good and pretend to do homework but all we really do is talk in the lounge’ evening/ mornings. A flower sale had been organized through the Union or something – my memories are hazed by lack of sleep – and someone was delivering flowers to the girls on our floor.

She had come to solicit our help, and some of us, most likely those with less of a responsibility towards our homework and probably less of bitterness towards Valentine’s Day in general, offered to help. Anyway, my then future-roommate and I had decided not to have boyfriends. You know, to better concentrate on our grades. The others stayed in the lounge uh, doing homework, and eventually a campaign was born.

We noticed that the initials for Valentine’s Day were, by some crazy happenstance, also commonly recognized as the initials for something else. That’s right, VD also stands for venereal disease. Can you believe it? We couldn’t.

Also, by what can only be classified as more luck, the school we happen to go to began with a ‘V’. In the interest of alliteration (quasi-bonus of having a writing minor: the ability to throw around literary terms) the slogan was coined. VD @ VU. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep but I, at least, thought it was pretty catchy. Still do, for that matter. We wrote it on the lounge window in dry-erase marker, proclaiming our clever genius for all to see. I don’t remember much after that. Maybe I slept. More likely than not, I didn’t.

On the 14th, went about our days clad entirely in black to symblify our general disapproval of the holiday and what it stands for. Unfortunately, our VD @ VU campaign was rather short lived, for several possible reasons. First of all, perhaps not all of the campus is as familiar with the initials of STD’s (sexually transmitted diseases, in case you are a member of the aforementioned group) as we had thought.

Second, there is a slight possibility that everyone on the entire campus does not feel the same way about Valentine’s Day. Maybe this day is more than just empty symbolism to them, and they were maybe offended by our implication that Valentine’s Day is equivalent to venereal disease. This is no excuse.

Thirdly, the possibility remains that our message never made it off of the starting block. Dry-erase marker is a lot harder to read on windows than on the actual boards, and one brush (purposeful or not, we are looking into this matter) of a sleeve could have negated its existence. In any case, this year we are not taking any chances. By broadcasting our message through the popular medium of the campus paper, we ensure that the message will reach far and wide, from Urschel to the frats. VD @ VU: Spread the love.