MY MOM DOESN'T EVEN KNOW I'M DOING THIS

OSFO's mom doesn't even know that she's doing this. But how mad could she be? She's a blogger, too. Isn't that crazy? She writes about their lives are a TV show or something and they don't even have a TV.

Oh, they had one once. But then Zeb never did his homework becuase he couldn't get his eyeballs off The Simpsons. (OSFO loves the Simpsons, too.). SM used to say that everything Zeb knows about the world he learned on The Simpsons's. He's 15 now, a sophmore in high school. But he hates school. Mostly, he likes to write songs and sing them in the living room when we're trying to eat dinner.

OSFO thinks he has a terrible voice. But no one else seems to agree with her.

SM and Daddy-O get so excited every time his band plays the Teen Showcase at Van Brunt Bar. OSFO thinks her parents are just happy that he's doing something other than getting lousy grades.

They always make OSFO go, too. Usually, she stands by the pool table and not near the stage. She drinks Sprite and watches the teenagers play pool. When no one is playing, she loves to roll the pool balls from one end of the green felt table to the other. They make the neatest sound when they crash into each other.

OSFO actually likes Zeb's band. But she thinks the other bands sound awful. Just awful. And they're so loud. She has to cover her ears even when she's over by the pool table.

So Zeb's the reason her parents got rid of the TV when she was only 3. Daddy O got sick and tired of screaming at Zeb to turn it off. The apartment isn't that big and DO is really sensitive to noise—he got the poultry scissor from the kitchen and cut the cord. The television's cord.

Really.

It must have been pretty crazy. OSFO doesn't remember a thing about it because she was only 3 but her parents tell stories over and over to their friends about the time they did this and the time they did that. And that was the end of the television. It went down in the basement, where it still lives on a shelf near the green plastic Little Typkes swimming pool and the car seats they don't use anymore.

On 9/11, because they didn't have a TV, OSFO and her mom went to the neighbor's apartment on the first floor so they could watch what was going on.

OSFO thought the world was coming to an end. None of the grown-ups were paying any attention to the kids.

Still, OSFO remembers that day pretty well even though she was only four. The grown-ups were all standing around The Kravitz's big screen TV watching clouds of smoke. OSFO and Pretty Girl played with Barbies. Everyone was acting very strangely. A friend of SM's died that day. She spent most of that week at their apartment waiting around to see if he was really dead.

Either you're dead or you're not, OSFO remembers thinking. But apparently there was a chance that he was wandering around with amnesia, in a hospital in New Jersey, or living in an underground hole.

OSFO wishes she had more to say about that week but she doesn't. Sometimes she wishes she better memories of these things everyone talks about like when she was a flower girl at her Aunt DD's wedding, the time Groovy Grandpa took her and Zeb ishing on the lake near his country house, or the cross-country trip to Colorado to visit Kane and Luca.

SO OSFO's mom has a blog and a lot of people read it. In it she calls OSFO, The Oh So Feisty One. Until recently, OSFO didn't even know what the word feisty meant. Then she googled it and saw on an online dictionary what it mean: Spunky. Spirited. Lively.

Her mom says it's a big compliment but she would have liked something like, I don't know, the Oh So Pretty One or or The Oh So Artistic One because when she grows up she is definitely going to design clothes, paint pictures, and design cool sports cars.

In the blog, Zeb is Teen Spirit, probably because he's a teenager. Maybe she calls him that because his room smells when the doors been closed and he's been hanging out with this friends. PU.

Or maybe there's another reason.

OSFO doesn't mind mom's blog that much but she hates the fact that she'd rather type on her laptop computer than do something with her. If you asked her she'd say it wasn't true, that she and OSFO spend so much time together. She might even get all sad and remind OSFO of their trips to Fluffy Bear Workshop or the hotel in New Jersey with the seven inter-connecting swimming pools.

But OSFO liks unplanned time together and just hanging out at home. And when they're home it seems that she'd rather be writing her stupid blog. Ditto for OSFO's dad, who spends his time re-touching the digital photos he takes, and Zeb is either playing his guitar or IMing his friends.

For OSFO, it feels funny to be the subject of the blog. It's like being a character in a book or a movie or something when you never really wanted to be. OSFO isn't sure who reads her blog but sometimes she catches people looking at her funny and she wonders what they're thinking: Oh, there's the Oh So Feisty One.

OSFO is definitely way more private than her mom, who'll say just about anything. And loudly whether they're walking down Third Street, in Met Food, in the school lobby. OSFO is always shushing her or saying, "Never mind. Never mind."

SM likes to talk and blog about her life and OSFO likes to keep her thoughts and feelings close to home. That's a big difference between them. But there really are a whole lot more. Differences, that is. It's funny to be someone's kid for your whole life and then you get to a point when you realize that you maybe don't have as much in common as you thought.

It's kind of strange. Maybe that's why OSFO wants to be with her all the time. She's really afraid that they're growing apart. And frankly, she doesn't know how she feels about that.