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

Sssh, I'm Thinking.

Everyone says they want to go out with someone smart. We claim we're willing to make all sorts of compromises on anatomy, personality and income; but we adamantly refuse a sped-class relationship. Yet somehow, at some time or another, each of us finds ourselves with someone just a little bit dumber than we are. I'm not talking about gaps in cultural knowledge or that big oxymoron known as "emotional intelligence." I'm talking about the bulb that never quite makes it past soft white at 60 watts, the person whose depth of intellectual curiosity goes only as far as TiVo will take them... and no farther.

A friend of mine is living with someone with whom she has a real partnership, shared interests... a good life together. But when it comes to having a philosophical conversation, or getting into an analysis of the movie they just watched, her boyfriend would rather start planning their next travel excursion. I briefly dated someone who, also, never quite seemed to connect all the dots -- his job as a programmer required intelligence, so I know he possessed some, but in many ways talking with him was like talking with a friendly alien, one unfamiliar with the words spanakopita or Nabokov. He confessed to me with a rather smug expression that the problem with his last ex was that she just wasn't smart enough for him, which meant either that he had a shocking lack of self-awareness, or I had him all wrong. Still, he was really cute.

I know another person in this situation: my current boyfriend. Now, don't get me wrong: BF never makes me feel stupid, and if you asked him he would certainly tell you I'm smart. He has to tell you -- and himself -- that, because I'm his girlfriend. Even when your significant other is kind of dumber than you are, you can't really admit it to yourself until later. Instead, you pretend the person is smart in some way that they themselves do not have the brain power to imagine. It's like trickle-down: You help the less fortunate by using your smarts to manufacture some aspect of cleverness to bestow upon your beneficiary. "Sasha is an absolute genius when it comes to organizing the products in our bathroom. I don't know how she does it!" "Paul just devours books. He reads a ton of James Patterson, I can't keep up." "Gina is some kind of savant when it comes to relationships. She just reads people really well... I never realized how much thought goes into nurturing."

My problem is not stupidity so much as laziness, but the effect is the same. I like discussing movies, when I can actually be coaxed into accomplishing the feat sitting down for two hours and concentrating on something. And I don't mind a philosophical discussion, until the food comes. But the main conversational hurdle for BF and me is politics and economics. He devoured media at a rate I found unfathomable for someone who was also pursuing a dual masters degree while earning money as a freelance programmer and interning at high-profile Washington, D.C. institutions. Throughout the campaign year, he had dozens of interesting theories and revelations about the impending election, so that sometimes being with him was like living in an extended edition of 'Crossfire' -- where the studio audience is empty. I always want to tell him he should find someone who is interested in analyses of topics with more heft than, say, the marketing of ketchup and mustard, which is really all I'd rather talk about. When he launches into a commentary on steel tariffs, I raise the latest issues aired on Celebrity Fit Club. He wants to convince me that children need to be taught theology in school; I want to convince him that it's worth listening to "Here We Go" by Trina. I think his reaction to the latest David Brooks column is all well and good, but what does he think about the fact that my four-year-old nephew's first school pictures have a yearbook-style reflection pose?

Just as I was starting to think that it was only a matter of time before I was ditched for a woman with a master's degree and a mean grasp of game theory, I saw that column by Maureen Dowd entitled "Men Just Want Mommy." The thrust of the column was that my desire to talk about the low-hanging fruit of life's conversation topics may actually make me a keeper. Dowd's point was that increasingly, men just want to marry their assistants or someone like their moms: Someone who will take care of them, someone who looks upon them as 'the moon, the sun and the stars.' It is true that I like to take care of my boyfriend, and I do marvel at his ability to expound upon serious subjects, even if I sometimes get distracted by water spots on my hardwood floor, or a well-made martini. Besides, Dowd writes, "Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them." My job as a Web editor for a media outlet is hardly threatening. Does the fact that I'm not paging through Bush-administration exposes or citing the New York Review of Books will imply that I'm just too vapid to do anything but listen and nod politely? Any man who assumes as much (bf is not guilty of this) deserves to be cheated on.

Battery Assault.

A recent entry at the pb.c reminded me to catalog my latest environmental offense, other than being human.

Pete reminds us, rightly, to be conscious of waste materials such as plastic bags. That I am. I have reused and recycled since 1990. I stopped eating meat in order to stop the slashing and burning of South American rainforests for cattle grazing. I eschew paper towels and plastic utensils whenever I can.

Remember when you were in college and you were idealistic about something, and then you got older and lazier and you saw the pessimism-inducing outcomes in the world (Bush) and you became this half-assed version of your younger, peppier, changin'-the-world self?

At one point in college a guy I used to date said, "Every time I recycle something, I think of you." That didn't really make me feel good, you know? It made me feel like one of those annoying strident people. These days I use disposable products a lot more than I used to and I don't belong to any environmental groups at the moment because I somehow make more room on the credit card for $40 margarita nights than for $40 memberships to the NRDC. At the same time, I feel I am less annoying.

Perhaps it takes annoying people to institute change. Or perhaps we need an MLK Jr. of the environment, someone who has the charisma to be the face of a movement. When was the last time we had a political activist who was sexy? When was the last time someone took a stand who wasn't just that boring, annoying dude in the dorm who talks too much about sustainability?

But I am digressin' from the confessin'.

The other day I decided it was time to remove the ailing battery from my Dustbuster and replace it. I opened up the back of the Dustbuster. A plastic case of four batteries lay nestled inside with a sticker that told me to pull up on the tab and lift the battery from the appliance.

Well, I pulled up on the tab. I also scissored the tab, pried with a knife, yanked and pummeled the battery until, with much effort, I managed to extract it. I left the room and went, dutifully, to Google the words "recycle nickel-cadmium battery."

Whilst I was a-Googling, I heard some very loud pops and eventually smelled something nasty. I thought it was out in the hall, that workers were doing something. I am so dumb that I even opened my front door and only realized something was amiss when the hall smelled like roses and my apartment still smelled like a chemical fire.

On the kitchen counter, the Dustbuster battery was smoldering and oozing. From inside the fractured casing, the misshapen mass guffawed at me, "HA HA! NOW YOU HAVE CANCER!"

Freaking out, I quickly grabbed the battery with a rubber glove, threw it in my trash and escorted it to the Dumpster, all the while flashing back to Web pages on which I had seen the phrases "NEVER dispose of a nickel-cadmium battery in regular trash" and "Where to Recycle Batteries." I thought of Karen Silkwood, cancer clusters, and unexplained Dumpster fires. Then I opened all my windows and went about my day.

So, here it is: I am the person who threw the exploded nickel-cadmium Dustbuster battery in the regular trash on Florida Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. I am really, really sorry. And I promise to write a check to the NRDC.

Tearjerk.

At a recent showing of The Family Stone, the audience streamed out of the theater while a lone couple remained behind in their seats, yoked to one person's grief. They remained as the staff worked around them, a mess too big to clean up among the discarded soda cups and popcorn bags.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I don't like going to the movies that much.

That may seem like an alien thing to say, sort of like saying "I don't like breathing" or "I'm not very fond of having teeth."

But really, it takes a very specific confluence of factors to get me into a movie theater. Going to the movies is like a minefield for control freaks like me: timing, seating logistics, random audience variables, questionable movie quality... the prospect of gambling two hours or more on any given movie is enough to turn me into a Raymond who'd rather just watch Judge Wapner at the appointed time.

One thing I need to start taking into account is a possible Inappropriate Emotional Response. In the case of The Family Stone, my crying started with the pregnant daughter curling up next to the sick mom on the bed, continued through the fraught dinner scene, and rolled on through the credits.

I could blame it on the fact that my mom, like the Stone mom, has had breast cancer. I could blame it on a very fraught holiday week, on many aspects of the movie that resonated with me. But it doesn't really matter when you're choking back tears while everyone else is calmly watching an average Hollywood film. It doesn't matter when you're hobbled by sobs, unable to exit the theater with the rest of the patrons.

I know I'm not alone in terms of seemingly ridiculous emotional responses to movies. A friend just told me about trying to downplay her copious tears during King Kong, which did make me feel better. Still, I hate being caught emotionally unawares -- in public to boot -- by cinema that many would regard as sentimental or melodramatic pabulum.

The first time this ever happened was at a friend's house in eighth grade. A bunch of us watched a VHS copy of the TV movie The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett as an abused wife who kills her husband. As the lights came on and everyone adjusted their sleeping bags and got up to get water, I sat there crying uncontrollably. "It's so sad," I sobbed. "Hw cld smething like that happn? *gack* *snorf* *choke*" It took me several minutes to calm down.

In this moment, people tend to be sympathetic toward me but understandably distant, as my friend David was when we saw Titanic together and the lights came up to reveal that I was having a virtual breakdown. "Ohh... are you okay?... yeah, it was sad," he said, obviously taken aback. In the end all he could do was politely wait out my fit. I mean, it was just a cheesy movie for chrissake. During the Stone sobfest, my bf delivered gold-medal support -- but I wished he didn't have to.

What's frustrating is, it doesn't happen every time. There are plenty of movies I have sat through with nary a tear, so it's hard to predict when and where a movie-induced fit will occur.

This is why when it comes to potentially upsetting movies, I prefer the DVD format. That way I can have my Inappropriate Emotional Response alone, in the comfort of my own home, with no one to judge. I can lie in a tearstained stupor in front of such surprise catharses as Lovers of the Arctic Circle or Moonlight Mile.

I like to think there others having the same Netflix nights that I am. I like to think that when Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction sat depressively clicking her lamp on and off, she wasn't upset about Michael Douglas; it was that she'd just finished watching Fearless.