How to Enjoy Your Mono

Good ol' mononucleosis. According to the National Institutes of Health, it is "a viral infection causing fever, sore throat, and swollen lymph glands, especially in the neck." According to your mother, it's the kissing disease—STD Lite. But don't feel like a Victorian prostitute; 95 percent of people will get mono during their lifetime, most of them in their teen years. Yours truly had it in high school and lived to tell the tale. And while having it is not as fun as getting it (wink wink, nudge nudge), there are still many things you can do while quarantined to your house for four weeks with the energy level of a banana slug while your mom feeds you Instant Breakfast and your neighbor brings your homework to you. For example, you can:

• Set up an Origami Yoda shop on Etsy.com.
• Watch the complete first only season of My So Called Life ten times. Jared Leto was hawt before he got scary! Claire Danes was awk before she got gorg!
• Learn Farsi (thus doubling your chances of getting into an Ivy League school and eventually the CIA).
• Find all the hidden candy canes in every copy of Highlights magazine at your doctor's office.
• Sleep enough to carry yourself through the next ten years. Think of how much you'll get done when you don't need to sleep until 2021!
• Cough on people and watch their reactions.
• Master the Throw Hard Sleeper.
• Read all the Harry Potter books backwards.
• Write a book about robots immune to mononucleosis.
• Take up extreme whittling.
• Overthrow the Official WD40 Fan Club.
• Come up with a new word, and mount a letter-writing campaign to get it into the Oxford English Dictionary with next year's crop.
• Break the Guinness Book of World Records record for number of texts sent in one month.
• Find a cure for Bieber Fever.
• IM with Chelsea Dagger.
• Figure out how to liquefy chocolate chip cookie dough so we can inject it directly into our veins.
• Mastermind the revolution against the cicadas currently overtaking my home. (Floods? Check. Locusts? Check. Still waiting on the Four Horsemen.)
• Lie back and enjoy the ride.

Have you had mono? Who did you make out with to get it? We won't tell. We promise. You can tell us. *fingers crossed behind back*

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