Do Not Spam the DNB.

The DNB does not tolerate junk emails.

When he receives them as part of a store "loyalty" program sign-up, or because he neglected to check an opt-out box as he placed an online order, he unsubscribes as quickly as possible. But some stores are making it more and more difficult to remove yourself from their lists.

The DNB tried and tried to get off the Dick's Sporting Goods email list, but no amount of Unsubscribe link-clicking was working. Last night, furious, he gave it a final go.

The Unsubscribe link took him to a page that requested to know why he would ever want to remove himself. He tried several times to fill out and submit the "Other" section, indicating that he had never knowingly signed up for emails to begin with. Apparently, expletives won't get past the Dick's Unsubscribe Censors, which repeatedly disallowed his goshdarn submission.

Unconcerned by this development, my resourceful husband found another way to express himself:

"Remove me from your email list, you BIG GIANT DICK'S."

This might make you throw up in your mouth.

Via Google Talk...

Me: "OMG are there a bunch of toenails on the end table by where you sit?"

DNB: "Oh, maybe."

I'll just let that part sink in.

Are you ready? Because then he says this.

DNB: "They should go behind the couch."

Me: "I'm never moving that thing."

Wherein I lose all my plant-based followers.

"As not-compassionate as I usually am, I don't want to hurt people's feelings," I tell the DNB. I'm explaining why I always find it difficult to turn away all the pyramid sellers who come my way.

"I don't blame the people, but more the companies behind the products," the DNB replies. He's hardcore skeptical of all the "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" goods out there.

"Oh I just blame it on you," I confess. "Like oh my husband is concerned about FDA approval, blah blah blah. But then they just tell me everything is all-natural, so how could it be harmful?"

"UM, like cyanide?  Some of the most toxic substances we know of are natural!" the DNB shouts.

Yeah, buddy, I'm on your side. Take it down a notch.

"Plants make this horrible stuff because, I don't know, they DON'T WANT TO BE EATEN," he continues.

I nod. "Man, plants are bastards."

"They TOTALLY are."

Dr. Douche

The DNB looks at my locked Blackberry!

"Wait, your locked screen says that your emergency contact is DR. DNB?"

"Well, before it just said DNB," I explain.

"So who added the Dr. part?" he replies.

"You. YOU added the Dr. part," I remind him. Sometimes people with bad memories will be able to recollect really random things with incredible clarity, but no, the DNB pretty much forgets everything.

"Oh," he says. "Ha. I was thinking it was kind of a douchebag move."

"It was. You're that guy."

You know how I know you're not lazy?

The DNB gets pimped at work!

This isn't unusual. Pimping is when a more senior physician sells a less senior doctor's body on the streets tries to make a younger doctor look stupid in front of a group intensely questions a younger medical professional about a topic.

On this particular day, the DNB was being pimped on why he didn't take a specific course of action with a patient. The truth was, he considered the options and risks, and decided to do something different. The pimping physician, however, doesn't know him, didn't believe him, and ended the conversation by noting that the DNB was "just being lazy."

OH NO YOU DIDN'T.

I'll grant you this: the DNB can be lazy. I've got 5 months worth of opened mail he needs to sort through to prove it. But at work? The man is at the hospital nearly 80 hours a week. I don't think so.

"How did you respond?" I ask him, incredulous.

"How was I supposed to respond? It was in a group. I didn't want to be disrespectful," he replies.

I get it, but I'm not happy about it.

So instead, we've compiled a list of How A Medical Professional Might Know He's Not Lazy:

If you've had to pee for the last 5 hours, and you're not on a family car trip... You're Not Lazy

If you've skipped 4 meals in 2 days because of work...

If employees return to the hospital the next morning the morning and say, "Oh, you're still here?"...

When it would be frowned upon to take a 20 minute nap during a 30 hour call shift...

When patients' families ask, "When do you get to go home?" and the answer is greater than 24 hours...

If you've rounded 5 times during your call shift...

If while you're eating dinner, you answer 15 phone calls and none of them are for your teenage daughter...

We livin life like a video . . . during which the DNB has to correct everything.

"I listen to a lot more pop music now since the stupid NPR station here is Half Talk, Mostly Jazz," the DNB says as we drive home from the zoo.

"Ug, but I hate this song," he continues as 'Forever Young' comes on. "Did you notice how the rapping is continually like a half second behind the beat?"

"Are you seriously down on how Jay-Z raps right now?" I ask. "You don't see Mr. Knowles coming into the hospital telling you how to intubate a kid."

"No because intubation requires skills Jay-Z probably doesn't have," the DNB notes. "Whereas, I have musical skills."

"This is why we don't let NPR snobs listen to Top 40 radio," I tell him.

He's tapping out the beat on the dashboard, totally not listening to me. "Seriously, his timing really doesn't bother you?"

I think he's on his period.

When the DNB and I first started dating 10,000 years ago, I remember he'd always get nervous when I'd go to get my hair cut. "I just don't want it to be short," he'd say. A few years ago, I had grown my hair out quite a bit, but it wasn't working for me. "I'm getting a lot cut," I warned him, and he looked panicked. When I came home, he noted my shoulder-length hair and relaxed. "That's not short," he claimed.

Last night, after another trip to the salon, I decided to address his weird Short-Hair Thing and find out what, exactly, "short" meant to him. Shoulder length hair? Not short. Chin length hair? Short. Somewhere in between? On the border.

This is pretty much exactly what he told me:

Girls start talking to their friends. "I need a new style." Then one girl's all, "Ohmigod, I totally know what you should do. You should SHAVE YOUR HEAD." And then all the other girls are like, "That would be TOTALLY cute. You totally should shave your head." And so then she goes and effing SHAVES HER HEAD. And then she comes home and is like, "Do you like my hair?" And her husband goes, "Ummm, I thought ..." And then she's all, "You hate it? I can't believe you hate it. I DID IT FOR YOU, jackass!!"

Digging for Treasure.

I get sick again!

"Remember how often I got sick my first year as a doctor?" the DNB asks.

"A lot," I reply.  "I wonder whether you've just built up better immunity to hospital germs."

And then he says this: "I think it's because I started using foaming hand sanitizer before I pick my nose."

"Ok, what?"

"They don't teach you that in medical school," he says, a touch indignantly. 

"Um, yeah, because they teach you to quit jamming your finger up your nose in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL."

It's called, helping you not waste your breath. You're welcome.

The DNB is considering a HOT DEAL at Woot.

"There's a hard drive here," he tells me. "500 GB, 7200, 35 MB."

"I don't know what those numbers mean," I reply.

"Well, 7200 is the amount..."

"No," I interrupt. "I don't want you to explain. I just want you to know that I don't know what you're talking about."

You Save Lives, I Do Amusing Things to Our Dogs. So?

I have no one to talk to while the DNB is on call.

The Buds and I go upstairs, where I start to read. Noticing that Aikane is fluffing blankets and arranging pillows to get comfortable on the bed, I get a brilliant idea. The travel neck pillow!

"Look!" I text the DNB, sending him a photo of my handiwork.

He doesn't reply.

"BABY!" I try again. "Look at the picture!"

Nothing.

"It's so cute! I think he thinks he can't move with it on. It's ADORABLE!"

Still nothing.

Then, "Oh cute," he finally replies. "I might be putting a kid on ECMO tonight," he continues. Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. Like a heart-lung machine.

I pause.

"I feel like you're trying to one-up my Aikane Neck Pillow."

Smells Like Teen Spirit

"You smell good," the DNB says after I shower.

"Is it my cocoa butter lotion?"

He sniffs. "No..."

"My hair crack shampoo?"

"No." He keeps sniffing and finally reaches my armpit. "Oh, it's your deodorant."

"Are you serious right now?"

"It smells like flowers," he sighs.

What's it like being a huge jerk?

I peer at the DNB's face.

"What's it like having hair around your mouth?" I ask.

"Oh, I don't know..." he pauses. "Why don't you tell me?"

I smile sweetly as he cracks himself up.

"I'm smiling," I say slowly, "Because I'm thinking of all the horrible things I'm going to do to you when you're sleeping tonight."

In celebration of 9 years of together-ness.

"What would you do if I died?" the DNB asks me. 

"Figure out how to spend a million dollars," I reply, not joking.  We're watching Hoarders. "If I died, would you have trouble getting rid of any of my stuff?"

"Totally. I'm very sentimental."

"What about the couch?"

"Are you kidding? It has TONS of memories. It was the first piece of furniture we bought together..." he sighs.

"What about my old kitchen table?"

"I couldn't get rid of that!" he insists.

"It wasn't even yours! You weren't even involved with that purchase."

"Yeah, but I remember sitting at it."

I roll my eyes. "Let's talk about what's really important. How about my shoes?"

"I'm trashing them all."

"Fine. Then with my million dollars I'm buying a brand new Louis Vuitton bag," I say. "And I'll tell everyone it's what you would have wanted."

Non Sequitur

"So does the football not need to be touched by someone from the opposite team to make a kickoff a live ball?" I ask. 

"I don't know..." the DNB says. 

We continue watching the game.  My mind wanders. 

What I think is:  I need to go to the gym this month.  Hardcore.  Like every day.  Like twice a day.  It's more fun to work out with a buddy.  It would be awesome if the DNB had more time to go when I go.

What I say is:  "I wish you would go to the gym."

"WHAT?" the DNB turns to me, his mouth full of deep dish pizza.

"Oh, I guess I should've finished that sentence.  With me." 

Everyone in my family is 3 years old.

We return from our anniversary dinner to find my parents at the kitchen table, discussing something boring.

"Well, how was it?" my mother asks, smiling broadly.

"Oh great," I reply. "The food was amazing!"

Both parents stare at me with giant grins on their faces.

"So it was good?" my father says.

"Nothing was . . . uncomfortable about the evening? Nothing . . . awkward?" my mother chimes in.

"Ummm, no." My parents are totally losing it.

"Why don't you take off your coat?" my father suggests.

I do, and both of them start giggling. I twist around to find a clothespin attached to the back of my sweater.

My mother is about to pee herself. "I put that on you before you left!" she cackles.

"HONEY," I say pointedly to the DNB. "Remember how it's us against the world? You're supposed to watch for these things!" Then I pause, remembering. I let the host take my coat as we entered the restaurant. "So everyone in that very fancy dining establishment saw it. Probably they were all making fun of me."

"Yes," my father replies solemnly. "We've been getting calls . . ."

Still in Love 2009

We celebrate our anniversary!

On the way home from dinner, we listen to our ipod's Anniversary playlist.  Opinions differ as to when it was originally created, but theories suggest 2001 or 2007.  Either way, it's a lovely mix of touching melodies: Ben Folds "The Luckiest," Nat King Cole "L-O-V-E," and Bloodhound Gang "Bad Touch."

When "Save Tonight" comes on for a little late-90's nostalgia, the DNB gets mushy.  "When we were dating long-distance," he says, "this song used to make me long for the day when we could really be together; when we wouldn't have to say goodbye after only a day or two."

AWWWWWW.

He sighs, and I pat his hand lovingly.  "It's so different now that we're married," he continues.  "It's like . . . it's like you never leave."

Wherein things go from bad to worse.

We play a family game!

We are visiting my family in Virginia, and the assembled crowd includes my parents, all 4 of my siblings, two spouses, an exchange student who's been living with my family for three years, and two of the three Buds.

The game, announces one of my sisters, plays like written Telephone. Each person gets a stack of paper. On the top sheet, we are to write a saying or a phrase. Then we each pass our stack to the left, and the next person interprets the phrase in a drawing. Another pass, and the third person must - looking only at the drawing - write what they think the original phrase was. And so on, until each stack has passed completely around the group.

Oh yes, hilarity ensues.

My brother selects as his phrase, "I have a dream..."

This gets passed to my father, who draws what appears to be someone lying in bed either dreaming or smoking.  Just say no, kids.

Next, my sister interprets this as the following:

We'll ignore the fact that a delightful fluffy cloud of dream-smoke does not a nightmare make. She passes the stack to me, upon which the whole thing heads downhill.

In my zeal to make sure the "boy" part of the phrase is understood, I draw an anatomically correct stick figure. I also clarify the bad dream portion by including another stick figure being shot. Seemed straight forward enough to me.

APPARENTLY NOT because the DNB passes this bad boy on to my mother. "MORNING WOOD?" I shriek when we review the stack later.  Leave it to us to ruin a perfectly nice family game.

"Well, it definitely looks like the person is dreaming about watching a porn shoot," he defends himself. "Imagine how I felt having to pass that phrase on to your mom!"

Fortunately, my mother is sweet and innocent, and interprets this in the nicest, mommish way possible: morning, with a neat pile of logs.

This she hands to my other sister, who does her best.  Ah yes, the old "the rooster crows in the morning at the 3 logs" saying.  It's a classic. 

My brother-in-law interprets this beautifully, with a careful depiction of a rooster crowing at precisely three logs.

Our exchange student is the last to receive the stack. Maybe in Korea chickens comment instead of cluck?  Even Asian animals are smart!

 

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

"Ok, so I found the perfect candidate for the MTV show 'Made,'" the DNB emails me during his last shift in the Emergency Department. "She needs to be made into NOT A TOTAL DORK."

He explains the situation the next morning. An 18-year-old girl comes into the ED in a wheelchair with her parents at 11:30pm on a weekend. Her chief complaint is back pain. The DNB examines her, and learns that a kid threw a rock at her.

This seems horrible at first. Except that it happened THREE DAYS AGO. Oh, and the ROCK HIT HER BACK PACK. IT DIDN'T EVEN HIT HER.

"Well, it touched my back when it rolled down," the girl explains to the cops her parents have called to investigate.

The DNB coughs and avoids making eye contact with anyone.

"So let's just think through the physics of this," the DNB says to me, interrupting his story. "Let's assume the girl had SOMETHING in her back pack. A notebook, a textbook, something between her delicate body and the rock. How big did that rock have to be in order to hit her back pack and still cause back pain three days later?"

"A small boulder?" I suggest. "Did it knock her down?"

"No! I promise, in my expert medical opinion, it did nothing to her!" the DNB shouts. "My guess is that her World of Warcraft connection went down and she had nothing better to do with her Friday night."

"OH!" he continues. "And then she has asthma. Of course she has asthma. She has to have asthma. And she wants a nebulizer to take home. I suggest that, for an 18-year-old, an inhaler will be just as effective and work much more quickly. She tells me she wants the neb because SHE'S NOT COORDINATED ENOUGH TO BREATHE AT THE RIGHT TIME AFTER SHE PUSHES THE INHALER. Are you serious? You can't figure out how to breathe? You've only been doing it every few seconds for the past 18 years!"

Yeah, if you thought doctors don't make fun of patients, let's just put that myth to rest.

"What do you think, is she a theater kid?" I ask.

"Nah, she's too timid for that.  I'm guessing she played the clarinet in band her freshman year and then dropped out.  Band is already full of people who are social rejects.  If you get rejected by the social rejects, you may as well drown yourself."

"Yeah," I reply, "That wouldn't be too hard.  Just tie a rock to your back pack..."

Oh, DNB.

"How come both the driver and passenger seat warmers are always on after you drive my car?" I ask the DNB.  "Granted, you have a giant ass for a dude, but still..."

"Well, here's how it is," the DNB replies.  "Sometimes you have to get Taco Bell."

"Oh no you didn't."

"I DIDN'T WANT MY TACOS TO GET COLD!"

My dad is better than your dad.

The DNB tells a story about his childhood!

"So, I was playing in the sandbox..."

"Wait, what kind of sandbox?" I interrupt. "In the ground or raised?"

"In the ground." He seems puzzled that there would be another type.

"Oh, because my dad made us a raised, child's-height sandbox with a top to keep the sand dry," I brag. That was an AWESOME sandbox.

"Oh, because my..."

"Also," I continue, "I'm pretty sure the sand was the purest sand from the Indian Ocean."

The DNB is not amused. "Yeah well my dad wanted to make sure I experienced the kind of sand that the neighborhood cats experienced. They played with their food, ate it, and then crapped in my sandbox."