I’m not, by nature, an over-analyzer of my stats. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I look at them, because I do. If you say that you don’t, I’m going to go ahead and call you a liar, only I probably wouldn’t call you a liar to your face because I’m enough of a lady to be nice to your face and enough of an asshole to say it behind your back. But, anyhoo…I don’t spend time wondering who that person in Ireland was who came over and went through every single post I wrote in 2006. Mostly I feel bad for Mr. Ireland because I probably didn’t write anything worthy of being read in 2006. Although I don’t feel too badly for him because he probably has a really sexy accent and probably gets a ton of ladies drooling over him, assuming he looks like Jonathan Rhys Meyers because in my head, every Irish reader I have looks like him.

Also, here’s a tip: DON’T READ YOUR ARCHIVES.

And I don’t stress when there are a tremendous amount of clicks that come over from a password-protected bulletin board about Dungeons and Dragons or some shit like that. Although if I HAD to venture a guess, they are probably coming over to see something Settlers of Catan related…or they are total pervs and were the ones googling “Ali Martell bikini wax picture”or “Ash and Dawn total sex,” which, I have since learned after speaking with my third-grader, that Ash and Dawn are from POKEMON and there are a tremendous amount of people out there searching for Pokemon porn. Also, I have probably traumatized my son.

At my old job, when things were slow on Fridays, a friend and I would spend hours looking through my search strings and we would howl. Actually, it was more of a silent laughter because, well, that whole cubicle thing, but hot damn, there is little funnier than seeing how people came to your site. My favorites are the google search terms for “alimartell.com” or “alimartell” because, really, if you know that my site is alimartell.com, surely you don’t need to google that. What is that about, actually? I mean, surely it’s not laziness. Is it someone who doesn’t realize how a web browser works? And then, of course, we have the pervs…the “alimartell virginity”s and the “ali martell nude”s and the “alimartel brazilian landing strip”s and the – my personal favorite – “alimartell is her vag pretty”s. AHEM. So, once we sift through the top search phrases, which include things like “homer simpson vagina tattoo” and “feel bad about hitting a squirrel” and “Patricia Heaton tummy tuck” and “how creepy is Howard the duck” and “Leggings are not pants” and “Zack Morris cell phone” the number 5 search string to get to my site is:

My Mom forgot my birthday.

Apparently, this is a sore spot for the googlers out there, who, obviously, are looking for someone to commiserate with. So, obviously…they come to me. Since, you know, my mother forgets my birthday on a fairly regular basis. It all started back in 6th grade when I got called down to the office to take a call from my mother who was so incredibly sorry that she had yelled at me and raced me out the door in the morning and completely forgot to wish me a happy birthday.

(Although, now, as a parent, I can totally see how this can happen. Because mornings in our house? There’s a lot of yelling. There’s a lot of waking my children up several times. There’s a lot of “NO I DO NOT HAVE TIME TO IRON YOUR HAIR THIS MORNING.” There’s a lot of arguing over what we are having for breakfast. There’s a lot of “YES YOU NEED TO WEAR UNDERPANTS.” There’s a lot of frantic searching for hats, gloves, mittens, homework folders, play scripts, library books, socks, fill in the blanks. There is not a lot of time for dwelling on things like birthdays.)

(But I still don’t forgive her.)

(If I had gotten my own Long Duk Dong and my own *swoon* Jake Ryan at the end of it, I may have reconsidered my anger.)

(But no.)

So, yes, I can totally commiserate with “everyone forgot my birthday” in Boston and “no one remembered my birthday” in Florida and “my mom emailed me on my birthday is this okay” in China.

But dude who searched “Boardwalk Empire Steve Buscemi oddly sexy”??!?!?

YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN.