Please pass the liniment, or maybe the scotch

Whichever is closer.

I've been awake since, like, forever today. I was up in the middle of the night after a particularly horrid nightmare that wouldn't let me go back to sleep. When I did fall back to sleep, I woke up some time later with a crick in my neck.

Not a stiff neck - a cricked neck. Like, every so often, sharp bolts of pain would shoot down my neck into my shoulder. This is wont to happen when I sleep weirdly on my pillow. Ever since being whiplashed in the car accident that severely injured me at age 21, my neck has had a mind of its own. It is bold, brash and demanding and if it were a person, it would wear tight t-shirts with saucy messages on the chest and its thong would be showing out of the back of its low-rise jeans. It wants to be positioned in certain ways on the pillow and if I don't comply, it bullies me.

So I went along all day, feebly gulping down some ibuprofen and it just hurt, that's all. But it was Friday and my husband and I were going to go out and spend a couple of hours together, and I was NOT going to miss that treat. My neck hurt when I got into his car. Owie.

We were eating burgers and fries together about two hours later and all of a sudden, I noticed that my neck did not hurt at all. Not! At! All!

"Honey, here's something strange," I said to my husband, putting my hand on my neck in the place that had formerly hurt.

"Have you recovered from your mild bout of the plague?" he asked politely, knowing quite well my frenzied tendencies toward hypochondria. "And how's your beri-beri coming along? You haven't mentioned it in several hours."

"It's not about the bubonic plague or about beri-beri," I said with dignity. "It's my neck. It is suddenly well, like there was a disruption in the space-time continuum that sent me to Lourdes and back within the last, say, forty-five minutes."

"You haven't been to Lourdes," he said, rolling his eyes. "It's just that you're away from Meelyn and Aisling and you've been gone long enough for some of the tension to drain out of you while we ran errands and grabbed a bite to eat."

That was the first time I realized that children can literally be A PAIN IN THE NECK.