Have you ever spent hours and hours and hours writing and shaping and pruning an essay you thought was really fresh and original and insightful, only to wake up and discover, after rereading your 1000-plus words of alleged wisdom, that GOD YOU’RE BORING. 

I feel like I cornered myself at a cocktail party, going on and on and on and getting all intense and squinty and like you know, man? All the while, shamefully oblivious to the fact that my breath was terrible and I had little bits of cocktail weenie stuck in my teeth. 

So embarrassing. I should call myself and apologize. 

So, that happened last week. 

But, then, so did this.

This is not staged. I got home from work, got out of my car, saw this happening on the porch and recorded it on my iPhone. 

It was 30 degrees outside.

And, according to Larry, Gus had already been at it for the better part of an hour.

You don’t have to watch the whole thing (it’s a little over 2 minutes, and it ends with Patrick giving Gus a ticket), but the :44 mark is worth sticking around for. 

You might learn something.

It's been a month now, and so far I can say I love everything about marathon training. This is good news for me and bad news for Larry, who now has to buff and polish his will to stay married to me while I chirp incessantly about the joys of endurance training.

I especially love the Saturday morning long runs. And I say this in earnest. I love them. I look forward to them all week. The early wakeup call. The frosty weather. Having 10, 11, 12 (next week it will be 14) miles under my belt before most people have finished their coffee.

I love how it feels to run with a pack. I love learning from more experienced marathoners, and watching our group leader sashay through the streets of Cool Springs crying "WHAT'S TWELVE MILES AND 28 DEGREES BETWEEN FRIENDS?" 

I love it all.

If you live in the Nashville area and want to train for a marathon (or a Half), I can’t say enough good things about the Fleet Fleet training program. In addition to highly organized training runs, they provide all kinds of support and resources—from gear clinics to nutrition guidance to injury screenings. 

Speaking of which.

Last Saturday there was a team of physical therapists from Results Physiotherapy on hand after the run. I’ve been experiencing a lot of tightness in my hamstrings since … well, since birth, really, but it's been especially uncomfortable since I trained for the half. And no matter how well I stretch, I never feel like I've stretched. 

I figured this was simply my lot in life, but just in case there was a recommendation I hadn't yet heard and failed to execute properly, I filled out a pre-consult questionnaire.

Pain/Issue: Extreme tightness in hamstrings

When do you experience the pain? When moving my legs.  

When do you notice an increase in the pain? When I am conscious.

How often do you run? More than any person would ever guess just by looking at me. 

When it was my turn, I explained to PT Steve that I have always been very inflexible and that I don’t really think of the hamstring issue as an injury so much as a chronic and annoying aspect of my personality.

When he finished evaluating me, he asked me to lie down on my side. “This is going to get a little up close and personal,” he said.

And then he jammed his elbow so far into my ass cheek that my eyeballs popped out of my head. 

And then I asked him to be my wife. 

OH. MY. GOD.

You guys. 

HE CURED MY HAMSTRINGS.

Well, he cured one of them. The left one. I felt greedy asking him to do the other side, since it was a free clinic and everything, but then later that night Larry volunteered to jam HIS elbow into my ass until my eyes popped out, and wouldn't you know it? THE RIGHT HAMSTRING WAS CURED TOO!

Apparently the pain had something to do with the piriformis muscle, which you can google for yourself if you are so inclined, because I am not about to pretend I understand anything about anything other than YAY! YAY! I KNOW THE ELBOW IN THE ASS TRICK! 

And that has made all the difference.

Gus has begun flipping his hair.

Granted, it is getting quite long, but it's hardly long enough, in my opinion, to warrant this incessant flipping. The bangs are not obstructing his vision, and because of the way his hair was last cut (by a barber who was undeniably high), the flipping action does not incite a single hair to relocate. The result, therefore, is less "Justin Bieber" and more "Boy with an Odd Neurological Disorder", and it's maddening to watch.

He struts through the house in his skinny pants, the only pair he'll wear. On top, he dons a Ninja t-shirt that is two sizes too small. He wears Pumas on his feet. And, in the parlance of Tim Gunn, I must confess, he totally makes it work. But then. THE FLIP, FLIP, FLIP, FLIP. Like an eccentric billy goat, head butting some imagined foe in his peripheral vision.

"Gus, stop doing that thing with your head."
"It's what the cool guys do."
"But it doesn't look cool."
"Yes it DOES."
"It looks like something is wrong with you. Medically."
"<Hostile, exasperated groan> Mawwm. You don't even know what cool IS."

I don't even know what cool IS.

Pardon me, but what DeLoreanesque time machine did that accusation fly in on? My parental contract SPECIFICALLY STATES that I was to get AT LEAST five more years of adoration (or at least mild, grudging respect) before my coolness even came up for review.

I don't even know what cool is?

I don't even know what cool IS?

Who is HE? To tell ME? That I don't even know what cool is?

Like he's some kind of rock star or something.

Brother, please.

For cheap laughs, you can't beat an Afro on a string.

I discovered this Saturday night, after the boys had finally gone to bed. Larry called to me from the living room. "Come. Sit down. Relax. Talk to me."

We were chatting about something I can't remember--Politics, maybe? The books we were reading? The jaw-dropping hypocrisy of the Christian right (just a guess)--when I heard toenails rapping on glass. I got up to let the dog in and saw, out of the corner of my eye, something dark scoot a few inches across the floor.

It is astounding what the human mind will choose to ignore. In an instant I'd seen something and just as quickly I convinced myself I had not.

It moved again.

My brain then registered that it was Gus's Michael Jackson Afro wig and quickly moved on to the tougher mental calculus of why the Afro was moving. Because my brain is not all that original, it thought what many brains before it have thought, in movies, and on television.

It must have been the wind.

I was actually thinking those very words--It must have been the wind ... or some weird draft from when I let the dog in--when the Afro skittered and jerked across the floor, toward Larry, who was crumpled up in a fit of soundless laughter on the couch.

"I had it set up the whole time!" he snorted, dangling the Afro from a wire. And I feel like Onion columnist Jean Teasdale describing it, but OH! HOW WE LAUGHED AND LAUGHED! A moving Afro! Sheesh!

And then I did what any good mother would do and removed the wire and put the Afro back in Gus's costume box where it belongs hid the Afro in the laundry closet so I could use it to screw with the kids the next day.

They had a friend over on Sunday, and while they were watching a movie, I set the Afro down in a corner of the room. As I pulled the Afro across the floor between them and the television not one of those little slack-jawed TV zombies so much as glanced at it. So I retreated to the bedroom like Wile E. Coyote to hatch another plan. When the boys tired of the movie and went upstairs to play, I set the Afro down at the bottom of the stairs and hid in the kitchen, waiting, and holding the wire.

When I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, I tugged on the wire to make the Afro jump. The footsteps stopped. I pulled the Afro toward me slowly. The kid on the stairs took a tentative step toward it. The Afro stopped.

I pulled the Afro veeeeerrrrryyyyy slowly into the kitchen, and the child on the stairs--who I then realized was not one of mine--FOLLOWED THE AFRO.

May I just say that if I were seven years old and hanging out at a friend's house and I happened upon an Afro moving across the floor of its own accord, I would so not follow it into the kitchen to see what it was up to.

But this boy is special. He is one of our favorite boys who is not our own, really, and I love him even more now that he just looked down at the Afro and then up at me like "Huh. That was weird."

And then I remembered. This is the boy who has a ghost tucking him in at night. 

So a living Afro?

Brother, please. 

That ain't no thing.

On Friday morning, the minivan would not start.

When I put the key in the ignition, it made this sort of tttltltltlltltltltltllt sound, and then--nothing.

So I walked Gus to school, and I walked back home and tried again to start the car. Ttttllltltltltlltltllt. Ttttltllttltltltltlltltl. Ttttlltltlltltltlltlt.

I set out walking to work (my office is only a few miles from home), hoping to run into one of my vehicularly equipped friends along the way. Sure enough, not two minutes into my trek, my friend Graham drove up and offered me a ride.

This is the part in the story where I blithely praise the universe for sending me a friend in my hour of need, while blithely ignoring the fact that the universe could have saved itself the trouble and started the fucking car for me in the first place. Tllltltltlltltlttl.

When I got to work, I immediately googled "tlltltltlltlltltlltlt" and "car won't start" and developed a short list of problems it might be.

A) It's a dead battery.

B) It's the alternator.

C) Your friends who buy new cars are smarter and prettier than you.

Larry was convinced it was the battery, so we decided to wait and deal with it on Saturday morning.

And that is when I had my epiphany. I got up at 6:00 for a training run. Snow was falling, the air was crisp. And as I was driving out to Fleet Feet, where my marathon training team meets, I had this moment of clarity. A vision, if you will. Preceded by a flashing light.

More specifically, the flashing light of the minivan's gas gauge.

Which had been on empty all week.

And I was all ... ohhhhhhhhhh.

I texted Larry:

And you know what?

I was right. Larry filled that puppy up with gas, and it was as good as new. Or as good as used, with a dent in the rear and a broken door handle. Which is good enough for me.

But gosh it's fun to be stupid!!

Think of all the pleasant surprises that responsible, intelligent people don't get to enjoy. When they think it's the alternator, it probably is. When they think they need a new battery, they probably do.

What a sad life that would be.

Look at this, and tell me what you see.

A twelve-pack of paper towels? 

Try again, looking through my eyes. 

Where you see paper towels, I see promise. Hope. The expectation that we O’Briens will live another day. Maybe even another two weeks.

In all of our life together, Larry has never purchased a 12-pack of paper products. Granted, ours is a 1926 cottage style home with very little in the way of closets or storage. Pantry? Pan try again. Even our refrigerator, purchased pre-progeny, is problematically small. So for us to have a Sam’s Club or Costco membership would be a cruel waste of savings, not to mention mini quiches. 

Still. We have room for toilet paper. We can do this, I tell him. Why just wipe for today--when we can also WIPE FOR TOMORROW! 

And still, the man shops like a hospice nurse. He doesn't come right out and say the end is near, but when he walks in the door from Kroger with a twin-pack of toilet paper, you can’t feel too great about your odds.  

So this. This TWELVE-pack of paper towels is a very promising thing indeed.

I hardly know what to make of it.

Or, for that matter, where to put it.

Monday was a teacher in-service day at Gus's school. And at Larry's school. Patrick could have gone to daycare, but then, who would keep an eye on Gus?

So Larry took both boys with him, along with their big plastic costume bin, for entertainment.

"They were as well behaved as they could possibly have been," Larry said.

And even so:

(Larry's text to me is in gray)

Patrick loves the REAL doctor kit and surgical scrubs Santa brought him (and Gus looks so cute in his skinny pants), and I was going to post some pictures, but it seems I got a wild ass hair on Christmas morning and used AN ACTUAL CAMERA to document our lives, which would require an actual insertion of a memory card into my computer, which is a task so daunting and old-fashioned, I will need another week or so to psych myself up for it.

I believe in signs.

I am one of those wide-eyed, flerfy derfy people who believe that everything happens for a reason, and that through every notable event or dream, the universe, or God, if you will  (and I know some of you most certainly won't) is trying to tell us something.

I am also the kind of person who will book her family on a 7:20 a.m. flight out of Philly on New Year's Day to save a few hundred bucks, even if it means we have to ring in the new year and drag the kids out of bed four hours later to get to the airport in plenty of time for takeoff. 

Despite the early departure, I was determined to get the new year started off on a positive note.

The kids were dressed, the bags were packed, the car was loaded, and we would have been on the road by 4:45, except that Larry couldn't find his wallet, because it was in my purse, where he'd put it the night before, to make sure he didn't lose it.

That was setback number one.

Setback number two: we had to return the rental car with a full tank of gas, and the first four gas stations we stopped at were closed. The fifth gas station proved to be the charm, as the saying does not go, and we were back on the road in earnest.

Except for setback number three: We were using the directions in Larry's brain. These directions had been transferred to Larry's brain by Larry's brother the night before. Which was, as I've mentioned, New Year's Eve. A little before midnight. Which I think we can all agree is an excellent time for learning new things!

So, after driving for twenty minutes, Larry looked around and noticed that something seemed out of place. Specifically: the airport. I checked the GPS on my phone, and sure enough, it said we were just north of WE'VE DONE SOMETHING HORRIBLY WRONG AND ARE NOW MANY MANY MORE THAN 20 MINUTES AWAY FROM A DESTINATION THAT WAS ONLY 20 MINUTES AWAY FROM OUR POINT OF ORIGIN HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU TOO <INSERT RATCHETY NOISEMAKER SFX HERE>!

We arrived at the Southwest terminal at 6:50 am (flight at 7:20), only to discover setback number 4: a baggage check line ten times the length of this story IF YOU CAN EVEN IMAGINE SOMETHING THAT LONG. You can't? Me either. I printed our boarding passes, bypassed the line, and calmly explained our predicament to the woman behind the counter, whose new year's resolution was evidently not "Be more helpful and friendly to Southwest customers."

"You'll never make it," she said. "Even if I checked your bags right now (which I have no intention of doing, because GUESS WHO DIDN'T GET HER NEW YEAR'S LAY LAST NIGHT AND ENDED UP ABANDONING HER NO-HAAGEN DAZS RESOLUTION ONLY EIGHT MINUTES INTO 2011? ME, THAT'S WHO.)"

So, we waited on line with everyone else and missed our flight, and booked ourselves on standby for the 9:55 to Raleigh/Durham, out of which we would "probably but not definitely" be able to connect to Nashville.

Through all of this, I managed to remain zentastically calm and optimistic, even when I noticed Patrick's brand new pillow pet had gone missing just as we were about to board and Larry had a near-heart attack dashing through the airport retracing our steps to find it, only to come back empty handed.

Even then, I was fine. Like a blind Mary Ingalls, desperately searching for the bright side. I THINK I SEE A LIGHT, PA!

At least Larry found his wallet! 

At least we were able to return the car with a full tank!

At least we made it to the airport in time!

No? Okay! At least we were able to get on another flight! And they didn't charge us the difference!

And at least Patrick doesn't secretly believe stuffed animals have souls like I do did when I was little, and isn't crying about his lost pillow pet!

At least we got the connecting flight out of Raleigh-Durham!

At least the flight attendant is only rolling her eyes and admonishing us for not hearing the call for "family boarding" and not kicking us repeatedly in our crotches like she clearly wants to, JEEZ, LADY, CALM DOWN, WE DIDN'T HEAR YOU. 

"YOU SHOULD BE ON THE PLANE BY NOW!" she scolded.

AND I SHOULD BE HOME SUCKING BACK A BLOODY MARY BY NOW, BUT HERE WE ALL ARE. HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU, TOO.

I guess the reason she was so annoyed at us for boarding with the C group (as our tickets stated we should), is because by the time we boarded the aircraft, the four remaining seats on the plane were all middle seats, officially making us That Disruptive Family That Gives Everyone On The Plane Who Does Not Have Children The Smug Satisfaction of Knowing They Totally Made the Right Decision. 

Our first victim (somewhat grudgingly) gave up his aisle seat so I could sit next to Patrick, and then the woman in the window seat offered to move so that Gus could sit with us as well. But Gus wasn't having it.

He'd already buckled in and started chatting up his new friend.

The blonde beside him is clearly looking forward to meeting her new seat partner as well. (She was kind enough to help him open his peanuts, but when Gus started playing with his eyelids half way through the flight, she did take out a bottle of prescription pills, and cozy up even tighter with that window.) 

When we'd all finally settled in, after we'd had our drinks and peanuts, and Gus had stopped talking long enough to let his new best friend get some sleep, I took a deep breath of relief and gratitude, and I closed my eyes.

2011 loves when I do that.

Within one second of me closing my eyes, our plane hit a massive air pocket and dropped, eliciting a collective gasp from everyone on board and sending Larry's Keith Richard's memoir flying into the air.

"It's okay!" I reassured Gus, who was looking at me wide-eyed from his seat across the aisle, while Patrick miraculously remained asleep with his head in my lap. "We're fine. We are totally fine."

After all, I thought, we've made it this far. Surely that has to be a good sign.

Epilogue

On the subject of signs, it might be worth noting that when I got up to write this post at 5am, I had such an enthusiastic spring in my step that I slipped in my socks and fell down the stairs.

And I didn't break a single bone!

YES!

Only good things in 2011!

Happy New Year.