Updated the webpage.

In seventh grade we were required to take a class called Quest. Although we didn't realize it at the time, it was basically a state-sanctioned self-help class meant to introduce adolescents to vague pseudopsychological concepts. It was taught by the school's two guidance counselors, both men in the autumn years of their lives. At its most innocuous, we learned vocabulary words like warm fuzzy and cold prickly; at its most insidious and controversial, it presented us with hundreds of non-specific, often patently false reasons why we shouldn't engage in premarital sex, and unveiled the dubious concept of "secondary" virginity. Most of us hadn't even lost our primary virginity.

To bide the time, I wrote notes to my girlfriend Laurie. We were both too shy to talk to each other, but communicated through our friends and quick silly notes exchanged during passing time. One day, she accidentally dropped one of my notes on the floor and it was discovered by one of the guidance counselors, a silver-haired man I'll call Mr D. He summoned me into his office and, because the note mentioned my friend Aaron, he summoned him as well.

So Aaron and I came to find ourselves sitting across from a livid, red-faced man who demanded to know just what the hell we were up to. As I recall, the note didn't say anything that incriminating; perhaps its worst offense was calling Quest "boring," which was probably the nicest thing anybody ever had to say about that sorry use of taxpayer dollars.

Aaron and I sat still while Mr D went on his tirade. We were both mortified and humiliated. We were good kids; we never got in trouble. We were reasonably intelligent, but we couldn't figure out what the big deal was. Mr D was having a conniption because we were passing notes? This man even read the note aloud to us, making his own editorial commentary along the way ("I'm sorry you two find this class so boring. But I think detention is going to be even more boring!"). The most perplexing moment in the whole ordeal was when Mr D paused during his reading of the note, glared at us, and said, "I'm beginning to wonder if maybe there isn't something going on between you two."

What the fuck?

After he calmed down, Mr D issued us both detentions. Aaron got one, while I got one detention for every remaining day of the school year. This may sound pretty extreme, but there were only about four days of school left. Still, I was devastated. I never got in trouble. And when I did, it wasn't even for something cool like swearing. It was always something bizarre, often based on an authority figure's skewed interpretation of my actions. In this case, it was the writing of a note during classtime.

A few years later, in high school, Aaron brought up the incident and we had a good laugh about it. "Did you realize that Mr D thought we were gay, and basically accused us of it right there in his office?" I thought about it for a minute, and then realized Aaron was right.

Here's to you, Mr D. You were a shitty guidance counselor. You did almost the exact opposite of the right thing. You let your anger and myopic interpretation of a simple discipline problem send you over the edge, and you told two thirteen-year-olds that they were homosexual. Just for the record, Laurie and I are now both teachers, and Aaron does non-profit work in Chicago. And we're all better at our jobs than you were.

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