google search terms: bieber monocle

I've been writing in this little blog for about a year and a half, and I just recently discovered the stats tab on Blogger.

Stats tells you everything you're dying to know: the location of your visitors (by country, don't worry I can't tell you're at the Starbucks around the corner. Or can I?), how many people have looked at your blog in the past hour/week/month, and where they came from.

All of this is very useful if you're trying to entice companies to put ads on your blog. But my favorite feature is knowing what people search for in Google that randomly points them to my blog. Not for advertising purposes. For fun.

A recent search term: bieber monocle.

What would encourage someone to search for "bieber monocle", you might ask? I was wondering the same thing. Here's my guess:

The scene: a love-struck teenage boy doesn't understand why his crush is in love with Justin Bieber -- and not him.

Poor guy must have been crushed when he came upon my blog only to find this picture:

on peeing in a cup

a portrait of an uppity, pee-judging health professional

I'm not a fan of carrying my own urine around.

I came to this conclusion after agreeing to pee in a cup every day for 3 months. One of our friends is doing research during her 4th year of med school, and her team is collecting urine samples from women to track our levels of some kind of virus, the nature of which I promptly forgot after signing the forms I was given.

The refrigerator at work where I have to store my pee cup is about 50 feet from the bathroom. But that 50 feet is heavily trafficked. People have seen me clutching my little cup. And for some reason, this makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I'm not sure why; another 100 feet away from the refrigerator is a hall of patients who have exposed themselves in far more personal ways than a glimpse of their urine in a cup. Maybe, since most of the people I pass are medical professionals of some kind, I think they're judging my sample?

And if they're not medical professionals, I assume they just think it's gross. (Because that's what I would do.)

While thinking about how ridiculous I am (a favorite pastime of mine), I realized that maybe, just maybe, I actually had an advantage in this specific situation. Because in my lifetime, most likely the only urine I will have to deal with will be that of someone related to me. Not the case for most of those uppity, pee-judging health professionals I pass in the hall.

And while I was looking on the bright side of this situation, I also realized that there was no chance of me:

a) meeting the man of my dreams in the hallway while carrying a cup of urine or

b) running into my crush (literally) and spilling urine all over him.

Also, I get paid to do this.

That's a lot of whining for a 30 second walk and 70 dollars, am I right?

Ike's dance party

Thanks to a generous benefactor (Justin Bieber), I received an invitation to Spotify. Somehow -- I don't ask questions -- Spotify lets me listen to any song. Ever. In full.

Of all the songs ever, I decided to listen to the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack and remembered one of my favorite songs from a decade ago, The You and Me Song by The Wannadies. The last time I heard this song, I was just a high school girl crossing my fingers I would get a valentine.

But I digress. The real point of this post isn't to talk about the juxtaposition of listening to a love song when you're convinced no one will ever like you versus when you're married.

The real point is to tell you that my dog loves to dance.

Well, technically, he loves to chase his tail. But he really gets into it when music is playing, and it's more fun to believe he's dancing.

(Don't worry about the last :15, he stops. And while Ike's too lazy to keep dancing, I'm too lazy to edit videos.)

Different week, same genre: 90's classics. This time when I tried to capture Ike dancing, he stopped and pouted. Luckily, the song is the perfect background for his angst.

I'm almost positive I listened to that song in middle school with the same pout and high pitched whine. No valentines for this girl.

couch potatoes

In the summer, when our handful of television shows are off the air, we tend to overcompensate. We start at the beginning of a series we've never seen, watch it obsessively, send back to Netflix and repeat. Not surprisingly, we have tv on the brain.

Specifically, we have Parks and Rec on the brain. Everything Aziz Ansari does makes me laugh, so I'm not sure why we just recently started watching. And Leslie's love interest in Season 3 made me giddy in a Jim/Pam or Logan/Veronica way (Any Veronica Mars fans out there?).

Our recent Parks and Rec marathon explains the following situation. The other night at approximately 2 am, Y must have been having a dream that I ran off with Rob Lowe. I assume this because he rolled over and mumbled, "Are you going to leave me for Rob Lowe?"

Without missing a beat I replied -- while pretty much still asleep, mind you -- "I would lit-rally never do that."

And the following situation can't really be explained. Y has been speaking to a secretary at the school where he was planning to do an away rotation. I asked him what she sounded like (because I saw her picture and needed a voice to match to her face, I'm weird like that). He replied, "Harriet."

I cocked my head. "Harriet?"

He rolled his eyes. "Harriet. Duh. Winslow. From Family Matters."

via... her MySpace page?

Which brings us to something I've been wondering since we had this conversation: when you reference a character from a sitcom that was on over 15 years ago, can you really just use a first name?

Speaking of tv, and speaking of Y's away rotation, I have recently removed ER from my Netflix queue. More on that later. In its place we've been watching Scrubs, which I've heard is the most true to life medical show out there. We just finished episode 4, where JD sleeps with a patient. So...yeah...

how to catch a kitten

This is one of the hardest posts I've written. No, nothing's wrong. I just can't tell you this story without making Ike out to be a total, for lack of a better word, douchebag.

One night while Ike was wandering around in our backyard, he started barking his THERE'S SOMETHING BACK HERE GUYS bark. (He also has a SOMEONE'S WALKING THE DOG BY OUR HOUSE bark, a STRANGER! bark, and an I WANT THIS TOY bark which sounds suspiciously like a high pitched squeal.)

I immediately assumed there was a possum in the backyard and panicked, because Y once told me that Ike would lose to a possum in a fight. And even though I've worked out that Y doesn't always know what he's talking about, I still trust him 99% of the time. And no possum was going to kill my dog, dammit. I had to do something.

So I made Y run outside and deal with the situation, because I (in a shocking turn of events) don't like rodents. To be helpful I paced and considered what shoes would be best to wear to a dog funeral. A second later, I heard Y scream at me to get outside.

When I got to the scene of the kerfuffle (that's right, I just said kerfuffle), Y was dragging Ike (who, thankfully was still alive) inside.

"Go comfort it until I get back, make sure it's okay," Y said, pointing around the corner and referring to the alleged possum.

"What?! No! I'm not going near some strange rodent! You do it!"

Y looked at me, not amused. "Go over there and comfort the kitten."

I turned to my right, and as if an ironic spotlight had suddenly been dropped on it, the tiniest of kittens sat shivering and mewing. Which I would be doing, too, had a mean old mutt just terrorized me.

mean old mutt

The kitten must have sensed that I am not a cat person, and ran off as fast as it could.

About a week later, I saw the kitten in our backyard again (alerted once more by the telltale THERE'S SOMETHING BACK HERE GUYS bark). The cat ran off into some unknown location, but I wanted to make amends; to apologize for the big goofy dog who seemed to think life was an episode of Tom and Jerry.

I tiptoed around our yard with a ramekin full of heavy cream(we keep things fancy around these parts), calling in my best cartoon voice "Heeeeere kitty kitty... heeeere kitty kitty."

Are you rolling your eyes at me right now? As I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I rolled my eyes at myself (and may even have blushed), but it was honestly the only idea I could come up with for how to get a cat's attention. Ridiculous, right? I mean, who am I, Elmer Fudd's cat-catching cousin?

After a minute, I realized that no, my method of catching a kitten was not doing any good. I packed up my ramekin and was about to head inside, when...

MEOW.

A cat was actually peering under my fence, as if to say You raaang?

Not the kitten I was looking for, but one of the neighborhood cats I've known for the past three years - one of the elders of the feral cat community, you might say. His timing and concerned posture were impeccable. I could have sworn he was panting, his cat eyebrow was furrowed in concern. I imagined he was at Feral Cat HQ, holding down the fort when he saw the bat signal -- aka heard my pleas of Here, kitty kitty-- and rushed over to make sure everything was okay. It was the only explanation.

I brought my ramekin full of cream inside with confidence. I knew with our feral cat neighborhood watch program as strong as it was, the little kitten would be just fine. Mean old mutt and all.

romantical

The scene: an impromptu frozen yogurt date. The girl, unstoppably excited about her signature combination of pistachio yogurt, raspberries, and mochi, dives in a bit too quickly. The cold enters the roof of her mouth and envelopes her. She stops, mid conversation, the brain freeze apparent on her face.

The boy stares at her with a loving smile on his face. Through the girl's crushing pain, she appreciates this look, as if he wishes he could do anything to make it stop. When it does, the girl gives the boy a look of relief.

He opens his mouth, the girl can only assume, to tell her he can't stand to see her in such pain; that he hopes he never has to see that pained look on her face again.

The boy opens his mouth,

"Know why that hurts? The blood vessels in the roof of your mouth rapidly contract then expand, causing pain in that nerve, which then refers to the covering of your brain. The covering of your bain is literally what's hurting you right now. That's why they call it brain freeze."

The girl makes a mental note of the subtle difference between the boy's "loving" gaze and the boy's "I know something you don't know" gaze.

on colonoscopies

I'm a very visual person. When someone tells me a story, I set up the scene in my head. What the room looks like, how many people are there, where people are standing, etc. If I actually visit the place in question later, I usually find out that I was dead wrong. But I still need my imaginary visual in place to be able to pay attention to the story.

Last year when Y was on his surgery rotation, he started telling me something funny someone said during a colonoscopy. As I started to create my fantasy-colonoscopy world (doesn't that sound fun? Sim Colonoscopy, anyone?), I realized I couldn't complete the scenario in my head: I wasn't sure exactly how one is positioned during a colonoscopy.

This was vital to my understanding of the story. So I interrupted Y and asked him.

Y has expressed interested in taking an academic career path; he's always liked to teach. So he did what any good teacher would do in this situation: demonstrated the proper position of a patient undergoing a colonoscopy:

That's the last time I ask him a medical question.