The end of the year is the perfect time to reflect on the previous 365 days: your favorite moments, times when you grew, and the buckets of movie theater popcorn you consumed. Some families look through pictures of the past year, others look through their journals, but I look through my Google searches. While pictures are usually posed for and filtered, Google searches show the true me: the me that knows Google can solve all of my problems.
When I was in 6th grade, my teacher put each student in a reading group. Mine read The Chessman of Doom. Another group read The Westing Game. 12 year old me was VERY miffed at this because I had a suspicion that my teacher had not placed me in the highest reading group. Now that I’m a teacher and put students in reading groups with different levels of text, I remembered back to that moment and decided to check if I was right. Although it turns out I was just a mediocre reader, at least I have an A+ in holding grudges.
Sometimes my Google searches are very lengthy and detailed, like this one:
What to do if you went to church for 3 hours and you accidentally put your roast on “low” in your crock pot instead of “high” but you want to eat as soon as you get home?
Often I forget that Google is not an actual person and you can’t ask incredibly specific questions. But in case you were wondering, the day I forgot to turn my crockpot on “high” was fast Sunday, and yes, there were tears.
Something I should have Googled, but I didn't:
This summer, Tyler and I attended a family reunion in Yellowstone. Although I love using Google to look up things, for unknown reasons I never look up the weather. Now this is not because I don’t believe the weather forecast or I’m taking some odd stance against global warming, but mainly I just forget that checking the weather is a thing people can do. Before our trip to Yellowstone, we didn’t look up the forecast. The first day we were there, the weather was nice, and we went on a long hike. During the last mile, it started to pour rain. No, it was not drizzling. It was not a trickle of rain. It was POURING. An ocean-worth of rain was being dumped from the sky and probably all the bison in the park could hear me yelling as we ran towards our car, “No one told me to bring a rain jacket! I am never doing this again!!” The next morning, it was sunny. We went on a few hikes, and in the afternoon we started walking around the boardwalk (people who are familiar with Yellowstone ask me which part of the park we went to see, and I am informed enough that I can tell you that this section of boardwalk is one of the parts of Yellowstone that does NOT have the lodge with the ice cream shop in it) and it started to HAIL. So just like the day before, we sprinted back to our car while everyone else with rain jackets walked around. Although we weren’t prepared for the rain, I am pleased to say I hardly noticed the puddles of water sloshing around in my shoes when we finally made it to the section of boardwalk in Yellowstone that DOES feature an ice cream shop.
This year, Tyler and I were happy to have season tickets to BYU football. Unfortunately, they were absolutely terrible this year. At the beginning of the season they looked bad, but we would say, “At least they should be able to win some of those other games” and “Their schedule will get easier.” Then they played a few more games and we said, “They’re pretty bad, but at least they can win some of the easy ones.” Spoiler Alert: They did NOT win the easy ones. But we went to the games, and it was hilarious and fun in a kind of “this is the worst BYU football team that has existed in my lifetime” sort of way. 
This year for Halloween the staff at my school decided to dress up as food. Emmie and I went as bacon and eggs, but when my egg costume arrived in the mail it had been folded, so there were lots of deep creases in it. The next two weeks were spent trying to figure out how to unwrinkle my costume that specifically said “Do not iron” on it. (Solution: Iron it.) I don’t think Tyler knew when he agreed to marry me that he would come home one day and I’d jump out from around the corner wearing my egg costume yelling, “THE IRON WORKED!”, but I suppose marriage is full of surprises.
When Tyler and I were first dating, I introduced him to one of my many well thought out theories: an athlete is better because of their name. Do we really think that Usain Bolt’s parents thought “Hmm...let’s name him Usain Bolt. The name has a nice ring to it...the “nice, average, never win any gold medals” kind of ring.” Of course not! His parents knew EXACTLY what they were doing. Coco Crisp. Metta World Peace. Tiger Woods. Andrew Luck. How could you possibly go wrong when you’re literally wearing the word ‘Luck’ on your jersey?! These names were no accident. Tyler didn’t believe me. Luckily this year a VERY scholarly article by Bill Simmons came out this year, suggesting that perhaps Blake Bortles, the quarterback for the Jaguars, doesn’t perform as well because of his name. This has been the first time one of my bizarre theories have ever been backed up, so it was definitely a highlight of 2017.
May your Google searches of 2018 be even more bizarre than 2017’s. Happy New Year!
