(No) Wonder

Outlook Not So Good

Fortune-telling, catastrophizing, and how the future affects the present Hi (No) Wonder-ers, College provided me with many things: a strong foundational liberal arts background, lifelong friendships (including my wife), and - not insignificantly - my first consistent access to a pool table. Shooting pool was my study break of choice;

I'll Allow It

TL;DR. It’s OK for people to find joy in things we don’t personally care about. Good, even.   Hi (No) Wonder-ers, I’d like to dedicate this to some of my least favorite people: the SAWBs (SAnctimonious Wet Blankets). This is a very real, perfectly cromulent term and

Wishing You the Best In Your Future Endeavors

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love rejection letters Hi (No) Wonder-ers, Not to brag or anything, but I’ve become quite well-practiced at the art of handling rejection. You name it, I’ve had a rejection: high schools, colleges, medical schools, graduate schools, job applications, friend groups,

Turtle Power

Vulnerability requires badassery! Hi (No) Wonder-ers, Turtles are severely underrated. They have been around for over 200 million years. They survived the mass extinction events that killed the dinosaurs. A turtle supports Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld. (GNU). Turtles raised the Rotten Tomatoes rating of "The Master of

Cumshots and Capitalism

Get a load of this! Hi (No) Wonder-ers, When I’m not pontificating on matters of sex-positivity, I’m helping people urinate. They don’t call us urologists “The Stream Team” for nothing! In many cases, suboptimal urination is a matter of the prostate getting in the way of a

Uphill Both Ways

Cycle-makers, cycle-breakers  Hi (No) Wonder-ers, If you see my kid enrolled in a school run by nuns, it means that I apparently died before having the chance to stop that from happening. Feel free to extend her your condolences. “I’m sorry about the religious trauma. Oh, and your dad

Hot* Take Alert!

*Terrible Hi (No) Wonder-ers, Ever since numerous abstracts and presentations during the American Urological Association (AUA) 2022 Annual Meeting highlighted social media misinformation as a key issue, I have tried to follow the AUA's call to address misinformation and offer evidence-based information specifically about sexuality education - an

Better than a sharp stick in the eye!

“Better than nothing” depends on the definition of “nothing.” Hi (No) Wonder-ers, We’ve all been there: we get something that’s admittedly unexciting and much less than we hoped for… but it’s better than nothing, and better than something actively harmful. It might have been a lowball offer

The Ace Place

Under My Umbrella Hi (No) Wonder-ers, In addition to my mother’s birthday (Happy Birthday Ma, love you!) April 6 is also International Asexuality Day. JK Rowling, “Harry Potter” author turned full-time bigot, saw it fit to make the asexual (“Ace”) community her latest hate target.  Anyone JK Rowling dislikes

Sexy Yogi Berra

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” Hi (No) Wonder-ers, I’ve been to ten Major League ballparks. That is, if you count Comiskey New Comiskey US Cellular Field Guaranteed Rate Field Rate Field, home of the White Sox, a team that regularly strains the very definition of what

Vipers Dressed in Empaths' Clothing

Bloody urine and why women choose the bear. TRIGGER WARNING. References to sexual assault and allegations. Hi (No) Wonder-ers, There’s something to be said for the element of surprise, and for how unpleasant surprises can hit like a worse betrayal than that bite of oatmeal raisin cookie you were

I Can Fix Him (No Really, I Can)

Whoa, Maybe I Can't Hi (No) Wonder-ers, Dramatic, sweeping, highly noticeable, very visible changes make for undeniably great entertainment. It's captivating to watch untapped potential being realized before our eyes. We love seeing frogs turning into handsome princes, ugly ducklings turning into beautiful swans, ragtag groups

The Post-Decorum Era

The constraints of unwritten rules Hi (No) Wonder-ers, When I was eight years old, I devised a purely geographically objective way to determine which baseball team I should support: I opened up a map of Illinois and used a ruler to draw a line extending Interstate 290 westward. Seeing that

The Great Escape

Getting away from it all to prepare for "it all." Hi (No) Wonder-ers, Ever hear anyone say "do what you love and never work a day in your life?" And then, once you grew a bit older, realize what a hefty load of bunkum that turned

Friends Forever?

Relationships In Flux Hi (No) Wonder-ers, Not to put too fine a point on it (say I'm the only bee in your bonnet!) I've been thinking a great deal lately about friendships, relationships, and family - and how our values affect the dynamic and longevity of

Another First Time

Survivorship Intimacy Hi (No) Wonder-ers, In March 2013, on my 29 ½ birthday, I had a heart attack when my Left Anterior Descending (LAD) coronary artery became 95% blocked. Some of my readers are friends and former co-residents who, having trained with me, remember this vividly.  When you have a heart

Git Gud

Discomfort as a Skill Issue   Hi (No) Wonder-ers, On my way to the hospital for last week’s OR day, my car (a little 2019 Prius with 160k miles on it and, God willing, at least 160k more ahead of it) ran out of windshield wiper fluid. Wiper fluid is

AMFYOYO

No one’s coming to save you, reframe your cognition accordingly. Hi (No) Wonder-ers, I’ve got a few new subscribers, presumably bots, who instead of names have random combinations of alphanumeric characters. To them I say: “Beep beep boop, comrades!” Now, as for the rest of you lovely humans…

Sexual Luddites

Incorporating technology into intimacy Hi (No) Wonder-ers, The Luddites were an early-1800s English labor movement that were concerned about the possibility of losing their jobs to automation, to the extent that they would destroy new machinery in protest.  Now, 200 years later, self-service kiosks are ubiquitous… and the term “Luddite”

Who Ya Crappin'?

Honesty as a best policy for intimacy Hi (No) Wonder-ers, In the mid-to-late 1990s, the Chicago-area radio ecosystem was… something. I had a 20-minute commute across town to get to my high school, and not one radio station played music in the morning – apparently, doing so causes listeners to bleed

HeadOn

Aristotle, Kars 4 Kids, and the science of repetition Hi (No) Wonder Friends, I completed my urology residency training on the east coast, the birthplace of a repetitive jingle so infamously catchy that it became the official song of The Bad Place. Since residency, I’ve learned so much throughout

Ars Gratia Amoris

Art, Intimacy, and Self-Image Dear (No) Wonderers, I apologize for the paucity of my writing output lately. Life happens. And in the words of the ‘80s Austrian band Opus: “LIFE IS LIFE, NA-NAAA, NA-NA-NA.” What that song lacks in lyricism, it makes up for in catchiness. Now enjoy having that

Nice Guys Finish Last?

Or was Leo Durocher wrong? Hi (No) Wonder-ers, I try to be kind, attentive, and thoughtful in my relationships. Sometimes I even succeed - often enough for people to call me a "nice guy." The kind of guy that supposedly "finishes last," according to former Brooklyn

Cognitive Distortions (Taylor's Version)

Cognitive distortions explained via Taylor Swift lyrics Hi (No) Wonder-ers, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based psychosocial intervention focusing on the interplay between our emotions, thoughts, and actions. When patients notice adverse changes of emotion and thought, they take objective note of the event leading up to it and

On Tilt

Regulating erratic aggressiveness before it spirals Hi (No) Wonder-ers,  In a previous life I used to play poker professionally. (No I didn’t, but you should see your faces!) Anyone who has played a few hands of poker and/or watched “Rounders” knows that poker imitates life: you get dealt