Nae, Laddie, Nae.

A first: Yesterday I encountered a man at my office who was wearing a skirt. I saw him again today, at the elevator, wearing a skirt of a different color.

There is pretty much no way to see a guy hangin' around wearing a skirt in your office and be cool about it. My approach was to glance down at his legs, realize what he was wearing, quickly yet still too-obviously avert my eyes, and proceed past him as quickly as possible.

I mean if you are male and wearing a skirt in the office, you might as well just wear a matching t-shirt that says, "Ask me about my man-skirt." Well, I do not want to ask about the man-skirt or even let on that I noticed it. That's because whenever I sense that someone is tacitly seeking attention in some way, my first reaction is to ignore that person as completely as possible.

However, I did involuntarily see the label on the skirt, which was Utilikilt. That would be a "Mens Unbifurcated Garment," in case you required clarification.

Are these items being worn by Scotsmen who are proudly guarding their heritage, if not their balls? No, according to the Utilitykilts people. "The only common denominator amongst [our customers] is self-possession and courage. Our customers dare to be comfortable."

Actually, there are several other common denominators amongst "UKers," judging by the site's photo galleries: beards, pale skin, and a fondness for computers seem to be pretty much standard. Tattoos and self-importance also appear to be popular accessories.

Just imagine if everyone "dared to be comfortable" at the office. Imagine all the napping, elastic waistbands, exposed feet and escaped gas. Unfortunately, one person's comfort-courage usually has a price, that being a palpable drop in comfort for those who are forced to witness it.

The Snacking and the Damage Done.

First you make your habits, and then your habits make you.
You become a slave to your constantly repeated acts.
What at first you choose, at last compels.

I encountered this bit of Successories-style wisdom as I was contemplating my fourth (snack-size!) bag of Party Mix today.

Party Mix has been my master for about three years now. Like many addicts, I'm not sure exactly when or how it got so bad. It all started innocently enough, with a trip to the vending machine in the cafeteria at work.

At that machine I found the pefect antidote such dire circumstances as being in an office at 4 p.m. "Can't decide between Cheetos, BBQ Fritos, Doritos, pretzel rounds or tortilla rounds? Well, why not enjoy them all in one glorious snacking power play?" That's what the Party Mix bag said to me, and I heeded the call.

It never seemed to matter that I always felt a little ill after eating it. It didn't matter that I never saw another human buying it or consuming it. All that mattered was how the crunchity saltiness seemed somehow to take away the pain for a few minutes.

The problem only worsened when I left one job for another, trading my old "dealer" (which stocked Keystone) for a new vending machine, where the Party Mix was of the Utz variety (higher quality, with a reassuring "0g Trans Fats!" label) and the bags were bigger and more expensive.

The seating arrangement at my office in D.C. lent itself to easy daily scrutiny of eating habits, and it wasn't long before it became clear to my coworkers that I was unable to get through an afternoon without eating a bag of P.M. I tried to kick by using other snacks -- Soy Nuts, Sun Chips -- but those were to Party Mix what O'Doul's is to Guinness.

One podmate was particularly good at giving me a chuckling look when I would try to return nonchalantly to my desk with the sodiumtastic combo of P.M. and D.C. (Diet Coke) in hand. It was a look that said "I see you," and "Oh, you poor thing," and "Your lack of discipline is endlessly amusing." My only consolation was that through sheer force of daily exposure to me, she too became addicted (though not as badly) and I could know I was not alone.

When I left Washington and moved into an office with a P.M.-free vending machine, I thought my long struggle was finally over. I could now feel what it was like to enjoy an afternoon without red 40 lake, disodium guanylate, "natural smoke flavor" and the other mystery ingredients with which I had been poisoning myself five days a week.

I was not to taste that freedom. Within a week of my arrival, a case of 60 bags of Party Mix arrived from Utz Quality Foods, Inc., courtesy of my former D.C. podmates (or "enablers") -- a gesture that proves what a thin line it is between love and hate. I tried to explain to my new S.F. coworkers why a huge cardboard box teeming with purple snackfood bags was at my desk, but they seemed to find it more disturbing than amusing.

Now, having failed to initiate any dependencies among my officemates here, I have been left to face my demons alone. The Utz trove mocks me daily, seemingly refilling itself from the bottom. And I am here eating away, stuck at a Party that never ends...

Veiled Threat: Part One.

I became engaged in February, and when the news was announced, my sister was among the first to step up with a token. "Here," she said with a snicker, and pushed across her kitchen counter a two-inch copy of The Knot magazine.

Having previously spent my energy on deflecting solid relationships and honing an arsenal of solitary rituals, I was as suprised as anyone to find myself in the target demographic of The Knot or any other bridal publication. But here I was, reading it with a mixture of fear, excitement and mostly confusion.

My wedding experience up to now amounts to one underwhelming performance as a bridesmaid and a handful of attendances as a thoroughly uninvolved guest. Generally, my interest in wedding details can be summed up as "Where is the bar," "Did I miss eating anything" and "How can I get out of this conversation."

Now, I am facing primers on invitation wording and guides to fine china. "I am not the kind of girl who always imagined what her wedding day would be like," I said mid-freakout to Mike, who is my fiance. (When we were going out, Mike used to complain about how engaged people cling to the word fiance. "There is no difference between being a fiance and being boyfriend and girlfriend," he declared. "You're either married, or you're not. There's no special, in-between status." Now that we're engaged, of course, he has come around to the word, but not before leaving me with a near inability to say it any other way than with faux pretension, the way we did pre-betrothal: "Fee YAWN say.")

"Well, do you want to walk down the aisle?" Mike said. "What do you mean?" I said. "Do you want a ceremony where you enter alone and walk down the aisle? Not everyone has an aisle," he informed me. "Of course I want an aisle," I said. "See? You have some ideas about what you want for your wedding," he said. And the sheer mind-blowing dimensions of decision-making chain I was about to encounter became that much clearer.

One of the weirdest parts of the magazine my sister gave me is the bridal gowns section, which takes up a considerable amount of the issue. One of the first things that struck me about bridal fashion is that unlike in other types of fashion, the models are not threatening. In many cases, they look positively suicidal and leave me hoping that whatever happens, I will not end up looking like the person pictured in the dress and have some hope of doing better for myself.

The other bizarre aspect of bridal fashion photography is the way models are often set up to appear in scenarios that, if they are lucky, most real-life brides will never find themselves in. I liked this one so much that I gave it my own caption.

Scared Straight.

The catnip toy looks cute and innocuous. The packaging on the catnip toy has no instructions, per se. It merely says things such as "Hours of fun" and "100% organic."

The packaging does not say "Guaranteed to trip your cat out until the break of dawn" or "Will set your kitty a-humpin'" or "Watch this instead of whatever you have from Netflix tonight." But the package should say those things.

Until the other night I had never seen a kitty with catnip. I had also never seen a kitty hump a shoe, stare spacily as if he'd seen the feline Jesus, and all but ask me to smack his ass and call him Judy.

First of all I don't think I've laughed that hard in weeks. Second of all I felt wrong the whole time. This graceful, reserved creature was helplessly chasing a little 'nip-stuffed chili pepper, occasionally losing his orientation and generally freaking out. He was making an ass of himself, if a cat can in fact make an ass of himself.

"Don't worry, Dusty, it's happened to a ton of people at frat parties," I said. Could this be healthy? I mean sure, cats should be allowed to get fucked up just like the rest of us, but did it have to be so intense??

Just like a frat jackass, Dusty kept me up with his partying antics half the night.

Sprung.

Generally speaking, I don't like spring. People are vocal about their yearning for the change of season, but here's what it means to me: rain, fluctuating temperatures, crippling hay fever (the only kind of "spring fever" I know) and pressure to clean things even more than I already clean them (which is plenty, thanks).

My feelings about the season can be best expressed by this photo of an Easter display at Duane Reade that I took a few years ago in New York. At the time, I was rounding the corner on a depressing walk through the Flower District from my depressing apartment in Murray Hill to my depressing job near Penn Station. I don't typically pay a ton of attention to drugstore window displays, but something about this one struck me when I looked closer.

I'm guessing that the third bunny to the right was a "Secret Surprise" indeed, judging by his companions' appearance. Godspeed little ones, I know your pain!

Family Values.

Right now I am living at my parents'. It's only for two weeks (honest), but that doesn't make it any easier to watch the trailer for Failure to Launch, among other things, while sitting on the couch next to my mommy and daddy.

I thought I'd transcended all of the discomfort I might be expected to endure the other night, after realizing that The 40-Year-Old Virgin had way more jokes about erections and porn than I wanted to enjoy in the company of my parents. But that was before Oscar night.

Anyone watching last night's ceremony may have blocked out Ben Stiller's bizarre yet unfunny green-suit moment, if not the entire show. The bit is not worth recounting, except to note that it involved a very tight unitard. Jon Stewart made a joke about how Ben Stiller had proved the fact that he was Jewish to everyone.

Then my dad said: "I don't get it."

There was a pause, during which my mom and I both mulled our options for enlightening my dad using the fewest words possible. Before I could offer my explanation, my mom said with a tone of authority, "It's because Jewish men are supposed to be so well endowed."

After I recovered from my bewilderment, I said, "I think he was referring to circumcision," and hoped the subject would be dispensed with not only because, well, suddenly I was talking about penises with my parents, but also because my fiance is Jewish.

I learned at a young age that before embarking on a trip or transition, you should always try to anticipate anything bad that could happen, as a preventive measure. Obviously if I had considered the idea that I might come down with chicken pox on our family vacation to the Bahamas, for example, it would not have happened, because the things that really get you are the things you didn't think of beforehand.

So it's obvious in retrospect that I should have worried about the possibility that my fiance's anatomy might come up in conversation during my time at my parents', but I failed in this regard, and now the moment was trundling right toward me.

Now we were squabbling over my mom's assertion, a stereotype neither my dad nor I had ever heard before. It emerged that the source was her best friend's ex-husband, a man unafraid of blatantly lying to serve his own interest, but a Jewish man nonetheless. Still, my mom's revelation of her source for this information produced howls of derision from my dad and me.

Well, hmm, who else might know about this? Who in the room had seen a Jewish man's member recently? I resolved to remain silent.

My mom didn't like they way she'd been argued down and waited before delivering the inevitable last word: "I'm sure Mike would be glad to back this up," she said, laughing. I said, "I'm sure he would," and laughed too. Then I proceeded to block the conversation from memory for several hours.

Buyer's Market.

When I decided to move from New York back home to the D.C. area, it was a precarious situation: I had neither a job nor any apparent prospects. But I did have a sister who was partnered in an upstart coffee company. So I offered to help out.

My sister’s company participated in “road shows,” where they took up weekend-long residence in kiosks at Costco stores and sold as much coffee as they could, earning stock space on the shelves. I found myself, not unhappily at first, standing on the concrete floors of various Costcos in the sub-suburbs, brewing and handing out little cups of coffee to shoppers.

Working those road shows made me feel a new tenderness for humanity. You see people who are disintegrating before your eyes: old people who haven't washed in a very long time; women with skewed wigs; trucker types who don't give a shit about your damn coffee because Folgers wakes them up just as good and costs a lot less. Lots of unspoken spousal weariness. Nobody is looking at one another. In fact, everybody is actively endeavoring not to look at each other. Why bother with other humans when there are so many vast shelves of product that you never knew you needed, until you found that it was larger and cheaper than you ever imagined it could be? It is disconcertingly impossible for anything in Costco to look alive, unless it is stuffed.

Samples of all kinds are plentiful at Costco. Food demonstrators -- mostly older, pillowy, lunch-lady types in hairnets -- distribute mushroom ravioli, mozzarella sticks, chicken taquitos, juice, chocolates, anything from the aisles they populate. After awhile, you develop your own sampler peeves. For my sister, it was foreigners who motioned at the pots and grunted but would not pick a specific coffee to sample. For me, it was people who openly grimaced or made disparaging remarks after drinking it. It was also both frustrating and saddening to watch the same person making the sample rounds without a shopping cart, multiple times in one weekend.

Here are my top 10 least favorite things people would say when they would approach our kiosk, which usually offered four different types of coffee for sampling.

You got cognac to put in that?
I'll have a tall half-caf latte with hazelnut syrup!
Which one is the best?
Gimme sumthin that'll put hair on my chest.
I'll try the Mo-tscha.
Is this grounded? Can you ground this for me?
This tastes bitter.
This tastes like Starbucks.
I want to try the expensive one!
Yes, regular please.

In the warehouse, I felt more tied to the word "worker" than I ever had in my life. When I got home I was literally sick from the smell of coffee. I don't think I had spent that many consecutive hours on my feet in many years, if ever. I slept a better sleep than I had ever slept. It seemed, after working in a series of offices at sending messages into a vacuum called the Internet, like the most honest work I had done in a long time. It also felt even more invisible.

It became very important to me that the person I was serving at least acknowledged my existence: gave me some eye contact, ideally said thank you, maybe even asked an intelligent question. The low occurrence of this behavior became excruciating, to the point where I began saying snarky things to those who failed my courtesy standards, as they were walking away. Often they were still dangerously within earshot. But of course, they never heard me.

A year later, when I was back to being gainfully employed by the Internet, I asked my sister if her company needed any help with the holiday road shows. "Are you insane?" she said, and certified me as such by not entertaining the offer for a second longer. Sure, the question had some validity. Why on earth would I want to repeat, again, the experience of being on my feet for 12 hours in a drafty warehouse, giving away coffee shots to harried masses? I don't know why. But I really did.

Pain.

I work for a media organization and am in charge of a feature inviting our audience to submit their picks for particularly memorable stories we have produced. People will write about that cute pet commentary and how it reminded them of their own animal, or how that story on astronomy was so enlightening that they just couldn't tear themselves away, or how their heart goes out to the person featured in XYZ story, etc.

Occasionally as I'm screening and selecting e-mails for this feature, I receive responses that range from disturbing to disturbed. It gets me thinking about what must motivate people to write messages that are so heartfelt yet so hopelessly inappropriate for publication. It feels wrong to delete them, so I store all of these messages in a file entitled "pain."

This one is the latest and most clearly delusional:

Regions Bank at 1300 W Ksiser Osceola Ar.72370 sent me a letter on the 2-9-06 giving me 10 day to close my account cause i have had 2 picture of Klan on the they being on my check for 33 year now Kait 8 come out on 2 - 21-06 an run a story about it if you like to do one call me at [phone number] i am home by 2:00 pm i was done wrong at Regison bank thank you Your Wayne [last name]

This message is exactly as I received it, except for the deleted personal information. I don't run things at my company but can say with some certainty that we won't be pursuing this man's story offer.

Here is another one:

I don't have a working car... This situation has existed ever since I was illegally fired in 1982 from a tenured, full professorship at Eastern Michigan University. Probably professional jealousy was the main reason from grants and publications I got. Now, I am most concerned the illegal method used to fire me could threaten all tenured teachers since it "worked" with me making me permanently unemployable for the past 23+ years. Thus, no car. Tenure was there to protect teachers from situations just like this. [My wife and I] get away from this by working as volunteer rangers in national parks, e.g., Mount Rainier and Olympic Rain Forest.

Since the other ones involve suicide, alcoholism and molestation, they have to stay in my Drafts folder: strangers' pain with noplace to go.

"Someone was telling my story," one of them wrote, "a story I never knew how to tell."

Narco.

Before getting into my dentist visit from today, I'd like to give a shout out to the ONDCP for the most disturbing ad I've seen in quite some time. I walked by a mall billboard showing an artificially compressed girl today, after already having been traumatized by the TV version, and watched to see if the teens passing by happened to glance at it and acknowledge how graphically and effectively it represented the difficulties of peer pressure, and how it made them realize that taking drugs just wasn't worth it, man. I think too many of them were distracted by the Abercrombie & Fitch store directly ahead of them, though.

Anyway it's been awhile since I've felt violated by my television, so it's good to know some bright ad whiz out there is earning his or her keep.

Neither infancy nor narcotics can be blamed for my lying passed out in my car in the parking lot outside my dentist today, but there you have it. Let's call it SAD, in one way or another. I nearly fell asleep at the wheel while driving to my appointment in lovely Gaithersburg, Md., but made it there 45 mins. early nonetheless. Instead of going into the waiting room, I cozied up to the driver's side window and took a nap, wondering what would happen if someone came up to one of the cars parked on either side of me. I kept having visions of people laughing it me, or calling 911, but the double-edged sword about suburbia is that you could do anything but have sex in your car and no one is going to notice or do a damn thing about it.

Anyway, I walked into my dentist's office feeling refreshed, yet slightly disturbed at how necessary the car-nap had seemed.

If you know the D.C. area, you might say, gee Christina, you must like traffic! Otherwise why would you go out to Gaithersburg from downtown? Are you a Costco member?

But see, I've been going to this dentist for about 28 years. 28 years and they still call me Christine instead of Christina. They still play some vaguely country music on the loudspeakers, though it's not as hardcore as it used to be. They don't carry Highlights anymore, but they still have Town and Country.

They're still as nice as pie and ask about my siblings, because they remember when we all used to come together, with my mom. No matter how much you go through in life -- peer pressure, braces, aging and pain -- it's always the same at Schneider Family Dentistry. There's weather, there's vacations, there's holidays, there's floss, there's family, and there's your next appointment in six months. That's something. No?

B.A.

The other day my phone rang and to my dismay, it was a solicitation call I found myself unable to hang up on: a student calling from my alma mater. "Are you familiar with the Penn Fund?" she said in a painfully young and optimistic voice. I could pretty well guess what the Penn Fund was from the name and from the solicitations that I’d thrown in the trash, but I let her talk.

While she outlined such worthy purposes as scholarships and improvements to school facilities, I thought of all the people who had graduated in my class and are now 10 times richer than I am. I thought about how Penn’s campus sidewalks were up for sale in the form of commemorative plaques, how Revlon magnate Ron Perelman had given so much money to the school that he had a quadrangle named after him, and how the student bookstore had become a Barnes and Noble franchise. (We’re talking about the home of the Wharton Business School, after all. There are a few people around who know how to drum up money.)

But still, when she asked me for my pledge, I somehow couldn’t say no. Maybe it was the flattering chit-chat about my a capella group, or a sudden thankfulness that someone as lazy as myself had gotten to go to college at all, but I felt a resigned sense of responsbility to my school that I’d never quite felt before.

The thing is, I feel sort of conflicted about my undergraduate education. It was inaugurated by failure: I applied to Penn early decision, and was rejected. This unexpected outcome sent me into a tailspin, and a flurry of desperate college applications. My jarred parents, who had previously felt able to leave me to my own devices where academic advancement was concerned, followed suit with the rest of the families in my affluent neighborhood and hired me a private counselor.

A woman named Marge was produced to guide me through the applications labyrinth. She spread out my essays and credentials like an oracle, and went soberly to work. Her favorite word was BIG. She taught me to consider playing the race card (a Hispanic last name is BIG); to drop my bid for William and Mary ("don't even bother; their out-of-state admissions rate is 15%"); and she set me up an interview with Northwestern’s alumni guy in D.C.(He was BIG in that school's admissions scene).

The weeks before my freshman year found me in the following predicament: enrolled at Bucknell University, wait-listed at Washington University and Northwestern, and in some weird "encouraged transfer" limbo with Cornell University. Turns out, a nice high-school record and test scores didn’t buy as much prestige as I’d thought.

I ended up going to Wash. U. for a year and then gratefully transferring to Penn. But when I got out into the working world, my Ivy League degree didn’t seem to matter as much as I’d thought it would when I was a senior in high school. It certainly didn't confer me automatic status as the next Kurt Loder or David Sedaris or Madonna or Oprah or even Ty Burr, my favorite critic for Entertainment Weekly. And it didn't seem to help me command a better salary than any other twentysomething striver. The most memorable benefit was a bump down to 11% commission on the lease for my first NYC apartment, because the broker happened to be a Penn alum.

Since finding out that it would be necessary, even with a bachelor's degree, to continue working my arse off for merely questionable rewards, I've really put the Baracus into my English B.A. I've also forgotten to get my Master's, which everyone I know now seems to have. Nonetheless, Penn now has a pledge from me for 41 big ones. Perhaps I'll receive a doorknob engraved with my name in one of the English Department bathrooms.

Image from TVacres.com