My email apology

I am an awful email friend. I have been rewarding my friends and contacts with self-indulgent tomes in response to their short notes. I respond to a few-line email checking in, asking a question, or exchanging a how-do-ya-do? with lengthy rambling paragraphs creating 1000-word emails five times the length of the original. I picture people receiving my emails, sighing, and shutting their laptops. I might have to start sending emails with a calendar appointment so people can figure out when they'll have time to read them. I am dumping burdens on my friends with a simple click of "Send" and it can only mean one thing: I have too much to say.

My most pronounced writing sin has alwasy been verbosity - using 4 words instead of the perfect 1 - and my years steeped in academic prose only fed that word addiction. I'm not saying I'll do a great job of avoiding that tendency here, but I do know that these words need to go somewhere, and my emails are too damn long.

And so I am revisiting this more appropriate location for me to indulgently ramble and opine, wax and wane nostalgic. In my 1300-word response to a recent 260-word email from my graduate advisor, I commented that my most motivating reason to write is when something irritates me enough that I want to rant about it publicly. I'm a good ranter - I know to enhance my credibility with a touch of self-deprecation, I know to give the opposing viewpoint just enough attention to appear well-informed, and I know in the end the best rants are the ones that are more full of humor than anger. Perhaps we can share some of those rants together here and my spirited indignation at the serious and the mundane can entertain us all - and save my dear email friends from a dire inbox fate.

A loss

I wish I knew the Simpsons well enough to find an obscure reference for my title. I think Lars would like that, and would be able to come up with the perfect suggestion.

I haven't written here for too long, and regret that in coming back to it now with this heavy heart that my last post was scatalogical. But again, I think Lars would be okay with that. And a place where I celebrate cynicism is certainly the right spot to remember all I got to share with Lars in my short time with him.

Bob overslept this morning, hopping out of bed in a mad dash to the shower. I think now it was a gifted few extra minutes of solace before seeing the early morning message that led to the terrible news.

I first met Lars in Las Vegas, which I'm pretty certain is something that only I can say. Hi, nice to finally meet you, and then into the car en route to the Grand Canyon. I know now with certainty that there is no better way to get to know Lars than in a six-hour car ride to a giant chasm in the earth, with a stop at a massive man-made engineering feat along the way. By the end of that day, sharing a look into the abyss with someone who could speak so eloquently about abysses, I knew we were friends.

Every year since, I would email or Google chat or hop on Facebook to ask Lars "when are you coming home?!" as December neared. I loved watching Lars and Bob together, that comfort that comes from old true friendship and deep knowledge of each other - which of course, with boys, is expressed as "bwwwwuuuuuhhhh" sounds and picking at instruments. I loved the Christmas we got to ask Lars about China and never knew how to tell him that, sharing some of his social discomfort with the unknown, I was in awe of the courage and adventure it took for him to move there.

Lars was one of the first things that led to me loving Bob. If he could spend his life with an over-thinking, over-analyzing, cynical and skeptical, sometimes rambling talker like Lars (all features I remember with celebration and love), than I knew he could handle me. It is no small thing to see the best of someone through who they surround themselves with, and Lars was one of Bob's strongest selling points.

What I loved most about Lars was that he was an observer of the tiniest details of social life, the little moments and behaviors and mores and irritations of society and culture. Few people could see and describe the world at the level which Lars did, and it made conversation with him engaging, humorous, sometimes sad, and always worthwhile. I daresay I got more value out of discussing the world with him than I did in 4 years of Sociology PhD courses. It certainly was far more interesting.

Lars would be the best person to talk to about how I feel today, to discuss how strange it is to still see the online presence of someone who is, shockingly, gone. I only have two friends listed on my Google Talk account, two people who I am always interested to talk to if their little icon turns green, indicating they are online. I am marrying one of them in November. The other is Lars. I stared at that icon today, the little gray x saying so much more than that he was offline. I can't bear to remove his name from the list, but don't know how long I can take the sadness of seeing it there either.

I looked again at his online portfolio today, reminded of his talent, creativity, and soulful artistry. I imagine an employer clicking on the link to his resume and wanting to hire him, giving opportunity for more of his creation, instead of the loss of it we all now have to accept.

I think Lars most of all would be fascinated by us saying good-bye on Facebook, desperate for a way to tell him how much we love him, already miss him, and struggle with how to make sense of his loss. I do know that I will hear his voice again, that the sound of a solo bass guitar will always bring to me feelings of his intricate beauty. And someday I will be able to look again at this picture with a smile instead of just tears, grateful for that day, if nothing else, to discuss the universe with Lars.

Now Taking Requests

I had my first blog request recently and I'm not sure I can fulfill the request in the manner it deserves. We were enjoying a long overdue - and cheesily named - "ladies' night" downtown, successfully pulling together two new moms, one toddler mom, one woman with restaurant hours, one woman with night school hours, and others with just the usual schedule conflicts - it was no small feat to bring this group together.

We joined at the new trendy Lebanese restaurant and then enjoyed the beautiful night outside when we snagged a sidewalk table at The Foundation, a bar that makes it's own sodas and knockout cocktails. While enjoying my root beer float-inspired drink, made with Stoli Vanilla, root beer, and an egg yolk (freaky, huh?), Kyley grabbed my attention.

Kyley grabs most people's attention, as the beautiful spunky redhead that every fictional group of girls contains (c'mon, there had to be one in the Babysitter's Club), but that you rarely come across in real life. Kyley is model-thin, not quite model-tall, and colored in a way that women who pretend to be ginger waste buckets of money trying to emulate. She carries herself not with the cockiness of a girl that knows she's pretty, but with the confidence of a woman who believes her soul is beautiful. I suspect this confidence may have come from sharing the burdens of an awkward phase before becoming a beautiful woman, as long limbs, orange hair, and pale skin may have been less easily embraced by a growing teen.

And so this most beautiful of women, sipping her bourbon cocktail, turned to me and demanded that I write a blog about poop.

"Kirsten, you need to write a blog that tells people they are responsible for their own floating turds".

One can assume Kyley was coming from a very personal experience with this request, and perhaps hasn't spent her life lamenting the world-at-large's floating turd behavior. It wasn't hard to guess, as this wasn't the first time this group of ladies has discussed his movements, that Kyley was referring to her husband.

For Kyley's sake I will say here that yes, indeed, you are responsible for your own floating turds. Everyone deserves to be greeted by a fresh bowl, or at the very least, a poop-free one. If it requires going back to check after the swirling motion has stopped, then you should go back and check. If it requires a second flush, environmental-concerns aside, you should hold that lever down until your evidence disappears. As a healthy, fully-functioning adult, only YOU should have any visual or action-based contact with your droppings. That's what a civilized society is.

We all have our frustrations with sharing the bathroom. And I would guess that those of us who take on the role of bathroom-cleaner have more frustrations than those who only hold the role of bathroom-user. When we remodeled our bathroom, Bob couldn't fathom why I would want a double sink. There was no polite way of saying that I'd rather he keep his beard and toothpaste filth in his own area. (Oops, just said it here).

Just last month, after almost five years of being together and two of living together, I tentatively, gently, drunkenly, lightly jokingly, brought up the topic of perhaps him choosing to put the seat down. I didn't even ask that he do it at home, but that when we are visiting my parents' house, enjoying their beach hospitality, that he start making that effort. I suspect he saw immediately that this was the beginning of my efforts to take steps towards him eventually showing me the same courtesy. His argument that it was a sign of respect to my father to leave the seat up for him falls flat. It is because of the unspoken toilet-seat-down rule in my family home (containing two men) that makes me know this issue is far beyond just my wishes but it is what is right and true and required in the world of courtesy, cleanliness, and manners.

And so Ladies' Night results in too many of us sharing our bathroom frustrations: the one who suffocates when her boyfriend takes care of his morning business while she showers in their tiny bathroom, the one whose husband started remodeling the bathroom months ago and left it an unusable danger zone ever since, the one whose husband stops up their rental house's toilet 50% of the time that he uses it, the one who spent helpless moments of her pregnancy witnessing the woeful cleaning job her husband did on the shower, and poor Kyley, who is too often greeted by another man's floater. I can't solve your problem here Kyley, but I have done my best to follow through on your request to share your plea with the world.

My Gift to the World

I was gratified beyond expectation by the personal responses I received to my obsessive advice on toilet paper and dishwasher loading. One new mother told me how she never paid attention to toilet paper loading and when she was up in the middle of the night, feeding her new cutie, she would head into the bathroom in the dark. More than once, a tired husband ended up doing a pee-pee jig in the door, pleading for her to hurry up while she helplessly spun the toilet paper roll around and around in the dark, grasping for the elusive end. After reading my earlier post, she now loads the roll the 'right way', and dear hubbie's painful prancing has come to an end. I daresay I changed their lives!

It is armed with this belief that my annoying attention to tiny details could benefit others that has led me to today's post. I am about to bestow onto the world the greatest knowledge I have to share, the solution to endless frustration and the satisfying creation of a thing of beauty. Today, right here, I will share with you how to fold a fitted sheet.

The first critical piece of advice I have for you is that a fitted sheet can not be folded in the air. Arms outstretched, grasping corners, and bringing them neatly together, while ideal for the neatness of a flat sheet, is a terrible method to try to fold a fitted sheet. The flat and the fitted trick you with their similarities into believing they can be treated the same way. They cannot. The fitted sheet demands a subtle hand, a gentle shaping, an intimate level of attention that the flat sheet gladly does without. The flat sheet is a hussy, while the fitted sheet is a noble dame, demanding appropriate attention and caressing before yielding to your hands.

As such, the fitted sheet, first and foremost, needs a flat surface on which to be shaped. If you have a sheet to fold, then I must presume you also have a bed and recommend using that surface for your folding needs:

With some practice, you can eventually move your skills to the couch while watching your stories, but do not be so bold as to jump right to that advanced folding placement. Start with the bed. Once there, find your four corners:

Once you have embraced and let this method be a part of your soul, you won't need to spread out the entire sheet as shown below, but start here Grasshopper:

This next critical step sadly lacks an effective photo, mostly because I recognize this endeavor to be ridiculous enough not to call Bob in from the other room and ask for help with the photography. What I am trying to show below is inverting one of the corners and inserting your hand like a mitt. (What we actually see below is how far apart my camera hand and my sheet hand can get. We also see, depending on the quality of your monitor, that I only buy sheets on sale and have poorly sewn this ripped seam together):

Take your mitted sheet hand and fit the corner you are holding inside it's opposing corner. Do this on both ends of the sheet so that you have essentially folded the sheet in half, but with the corners tucked into each other:

And here is where the magic can start to happen. The satisfying ease of the flat sheet is the right angles while the frustrating difficulty of the fitted sheet is it's lack of the same. What we are about to do with the fitted sheet is introduce the critical right angles that allow the neat and clean pile we all want to see at the end. To do this, fold the outer edges into the center. You will be folding the puffy, rounded, elasticized and bulky corners into the center, and giving yourself a clean right edge. The sheet I am illustrating with here is a king-size, so size of folds may be different with other size sheets, but the key is to get a right-ish angle where a corner should be:

Repeat with both sides so you are now dealing with a boxy shape:

Depending on the size of your sheet, you can now fold with the ease of corners as you would a flat sheet. With this king-size sheet, I folded it in half longways:

Now don't go running off to your laundry, thinking you've heard all my tricks and the path to the perfect fitted sheet is clear. We have one more important lesson to learn, a misconception from flat sheet folding that we must cast aside to find success with the fitted sheet. With the flat sheet we are used to meeting corners and folding in half. Whether up or down or side-to-side, we just keep folding in half until we have a neat square. I must remind you again - the flat sheet and the fitted are entirely different! We must embrace the concept of thirds with the fitted sheet, and it is this beauty of the triad that will finally allow you to know the peace of a perfectly folded fitted sheet.

What we have done by hiding the difficult rounded corners is create one bulky end and one smooth flat end:

Using the fold-in-half-and-half-again method now would lead you to trying to create a fold in the bulky corner collection and even if successfully folded, would leave you with one cowlicky end that keeps trying to pop up. Enter the tri-fold! Fold the bulky end down a third:

Then fold the smooth, thin end up a third. You have now taken the neatest part of your folded sheet and covered the most troubling, uneven part:

Even Doozer is impressed with how the mess of fabric from the first photo has turned into this shapely pile:

The final, beautiful epilogue to this tale of the fitted sheet: as the rounded corners of the fitted and the sharp corners of the flat sheet are reunited, joined into a "set", destined to stack together in the linen closet until it is time for them, once again, to be unfurled.

Knife Points and Charmin Rolls

Sitting on a friend's toilet the other day, it hit me that I have two categories of behavior when it comes to believing that there is a certain way things must be done. The first category is activities which I choose to do one way, and firmly believe my way is correct, but will give you the respect and benefit of the doubt of not challenging your way of doing it. The second category is activities which I feel must always be done one way only and for which some OCD insistence tendencies emerge.

An example in the first category is loading the dishwasher. Bob would argue strongly that I put dish placement in the second category of obsessive rigidity, but that's only when it comes to loading our dishwasher. When I am helping to do the dishes in someone else's home, I respect the dishwasher style that they employ. I think glass racks are for glasses only (and any plastic containers or lids, as their instructions always clearly state "top rack only") and bowls are more closely aligned with plates, but if I am helping clean up at your house and you choose to mingle cups and bowls, I will follow your lead. I won't even judge you for it. I also think silverware should be placed with the handle pointing up for reasons of safety, cleanliness, and sanitation. Safety because if the sharp knife point is face-down, you don't risk grazing yourself as you hurry through loading to get to the t.v. in time for tipoff; Cleanliness because a dishwasher spraying from the bottom will hit the food-covered tips with the most force when the functional ends are closest; and Sanitation because you can move the clean silverware from the washer to the drawer by the handles without rubbing your potentially grubby fingers all over the eating ends. All of these clearly elucidated arguments aside, if your silverware has the spoon slopes and fork tines reaching for the sky, I will dangerously place the knife tip in the same direction.

In my own home, I believe that the glass rack only functions at it's highest potential if you don't sacrifice space to a prong-hogging bowl. The bottom rack can be piled and leaning chaos, but the top rack has evenly spaced rows for a reason. I doubt that Bob will ever understand why I care so much, and I doubt I could ever explain it, but nothing in the way we share space can throw me into a fit of "this is never going to work" anger more than when he throws a glass into the middle of the top rack, teetering on a random prong. We have had actual arguments about whether the prongs are there to divide sections for you, making the best option placing the glasses securely between the prongs in even rows (my view) or whether the prongs are there to have a glass balanced upon them (his obviously erroneous view). When it was clear that he would not agree with my logic of the security and efficient space usage with my approach, I turned to pleading and begged him that as this issue clearly matters to me far more than to him, could he just do it my way?

For the most part, he does, and it has become the single biggest indicator of how far our living-together relationship has come in the last year and a half. When the glasses are placed evenly in rows in the dishwasher, not sloppily dangling haphazardly from prongs, I believe that we have found a balance, that he respects the work I do in the kitchen, that our lives can progress together in an organized home. But when I find a dangler, a leaner, or - god forbid it or my head will explode - a glass placed so carelessly that it has fallen completely on it's side, every insecurity about our loving survival rushes to the surface.

I realize it is sounding more and more like I should have been medicated years ago. Don't worry, I am careful to self-medicate daily and I will save you all from the pain I could share here about the chaos wine glasses cause if you are inclined (wrongly, from my point of view) to put them in the dishwasher. Despite Bob's exclusion, for the most part I can respect that other people load their dishwashers differently. What I can't abide, what I don't understand, what my anxious fingers can barely stop themselves from reaching out and fixing, is a toilet paper roll loaded the wrong way.

As these issues of right and wrong seem harder for others to see as clearly as I do, I will let you know that the wrong way to load a roll of toilet paper is with the free end hanging from behind the roll. The right way to load a roll of toilet paper is with the free end hanging on top of the roll, facing the wiper, nose-blower, or mischievous cat. Picture a hotel bathroom that tries to wow you with cleanliness and freshness by folding the tip into a neat triangle (and try to ignore that this shape means the person who was just cleaning the toilet then manhandled the bit of paper that you will soon be touching). Fine hotels and even most shitty motels recognize and illustrate the right way to load a toilet paper roll.

I feel the benefits of the right way are obvious: if the paper is loaded the wrong way, you can't see where the end is hanging. And if you start rolling the tube towards you, you could potentially miss the end as it passes by. When the paper is loaded the wrong way, you could spin the roll around a dozen times and the end wouldn't get any longer. But when the paper is loaded the right way, and you spin it towards you, the end will present itself and get longer and longer as you spin. The end is closer to you, offering itself with friendliness to your service, instead of lurking in the back against the wall or cabinet, hiding from your needs.

Here my obsessiveness reaches out of my own home. If I know you well and think you will love me anyway or if you are someone I know so little I don't care what you think of me, I will correct your toilet paper roll. If it is clear the roll was changed right before me and the homeowner likely doesn't know yet which way it is facing or if it was changed by a guest, I will fix it. Even though I hate those stupid spring-loaded contraptions and know I am risking encountering the faulty one where the spring pops out and the holder scatters in parts across the floor, I will still feel the strongest need to correct your roll's direction. I know it's invasive and rude and slightly crazy, but I guess I approach it like my plea to Bob to just do it my way because I clearly care more. If you care so little about your toilet paper access that you load it the wrong way, than you clearly can't care enough about it to mind if I turn it around. I find it hard to believe that anyone strongly feels it must be loaded backwards and prefers it that way. I assume anyone whose paper is loaded the wrong way is a victim of lazy chance.

And I now arrive at my second product endorsement of this blog: please explore the new world of toilet paper holders. The one single item that makes me the happiest in the entirety of our remodeled bathroom is the spring-less toilet paper holder. Instead of that squeezed plastic tube between two cruddy porcelain ends, our paper holder is a U-shaped curved bar. You simply slide the roll on and off the open end. The whole process can be done with one hand, an amazing revolution in toilet paper holder technology. I find this advancement so critical that I once gave the 21st-Century holder as a birthday gift to a friend mired in bathroom renovations. I daresay it was one of the most beautifully functional gifts I have ever wrapped.

I think it's clear that it's approaching medication time and thankfully a bottle of Chianti is already open. I am sorry to those of you who have been unsuspecting victims of my invasive toilet paper handling. I'm just trying to make the world a better place.

The Perplexities of Naked Chicken

I called my mom tonight, as I sometimes do in the throes of a chaotic cooking attempt. She knows the basics of how to cook most anything in that instinctual way that someone who has spent thirty years feeding a family develops. I still look everything up - how long, what temperature, how do I know it's ripe? There's no way I could pick out a cantaloupe at the store, but she does it by smell. She knows how much meat to buy for ten people, whereas I have to step away from the meat counter and overthink a calculation that often ends up in way too much or slightly too little. I glance at a recipe a dozen times to check temperatures and cook times, but with my mom, everytime my dad answers her that whatever he just put on the grill will take "about ten minutes", she knows which meats will really show up at the table in fifteen. Along with my own mom, it is probably an unsung trait of mothers everywhere that she is the one person in the house that everyone goes to to ask "How long should I heat this in the microwave?".

I think I took her off guard with the intro to my question tonight, when I told her "I'm always perplexed by the naked chicken." But I am. Tonight was the third time I worked with a whole chicken and couldn't for the life of me figure out which end goes up. I've looked it up in the past, and was reminded again tonight that my Betty Crocker cookbook is disappointing in it's lack of an anatomical poultry illustration. There's one for beef - each part of the cow carved into little steaks with the label of what cut they are. Apparently no one needs this detailed guide for the chicken, other than me.

Having to ask for help on the phone, I described the chicken to my mother the way you would give directions: "If you're on the street, looking at the entrance to the mall, Old Navy is to the left". I described the chicken as if the poor bird wasn't currently beheaded and featherless on my counter: "So if the chicken is walking around like a chicken, with his little legs under him and his wings on his sides, is the breast the part that's on his back, or what's under him facing the ground?" My mom lovingly ignored the ridiculousness of my question and answered with the respect all reference librarians give to finding the correct answer, and let me know that the breast was what I was describing as the chicken's back. She tried to help me further by getting me to picture the Thanksgiving turkey, but I lamely had to admit that while the turkey seems obvious, this little roaster chicken's proportions didn't make a top and bottom obvious to me. It's not surprising I couldn't figure out top and bottom, since I mixed up front and back as well when I grabbed onto the neck bone and tugged, thinking I was pulling on the giblets that were actually stuffed in the other end.

I thanked my mom for her help, knowing she was going to get off the phone and turn to her husband to share something along the lines of "Our brilliant daughter just called because she can't figure out which side of the chicken goes up", inviting my dad to join her in disbelief of how I couldn't know that. Chicken anatomy aside, I felt pretty confident about my recipe endeavor tonight. Knowing now, at least, not to try to stuff the neck bone, I filled the chicken with lemon, garlic, rosemary and thyme, mentally thanking Bob's old chef roommate for planting all of these great herbs. The chicken went in a pot on top of some Dutch potatoes, a sliced onion (a rarity for me, being an onion hater), and a carrot.

An hour and a half later, the chicken was gorgeous. I sent a cell phone photo with pride to family members, shouting "Roast Chicken!!", exuberantly and unabashedly typing two exclamation points in the text portion of the message. I picked up a sharp knife, cut into the golden roasted skin, and my heart sank. It was pink. I got a little further and was dismayed that it wasn't just pink, it was brown. I had a disgusting, rotten, undercooked chicken.

And then I realized I had cooked the damn thing upside down.

What I was cutting into was not the white expanse of breastmeat, but the multi-hued dark meat of the thigh. I sighed and flipped the bird over, rolling the beautiful buttery-golden and crispy skin into the collected liquid on the platter and exposing the flacid, soggy, pale-as-if-raw skin hanging over the breast. Before I cut into this unseasoned sheet of disappointment, I made Bob come in and look at the chicken's beautiful backside, sent back into the darkness in the name of traditional carvery.

One would think this gaffe means I will definitely get it right next time, with such a vivid picture of the wrong way, but I turned the wrong way down the same street dozens of times before figuring out how to get to the taco place where we eat at least once a month. I fear that "chicken anatomy" may permenantly sit next to "sense of direction" on the list of my weaknesses.

It was, however, a deliciously tasty bird.

A little bit about poop

I have a weird new obsession; I hoarde quality poop bags. When Diesel and I go for walks on the trails around the nearby lake, I fill my pockets with the greatest poop bag ever: the Mutt Mitt. After so many depressing trudges with thin, flimsy, holey grocery store bags, I now walk longer, further, faster because I have the Mutt Mitt! No poop will touch me!

What's so great about the Mutt Mitt is implied in it's name - the key is the mitt action. The Mutt Mitt is like a bag-shaped glove, no finger holes or anything, but when you put your hand inside, the bottom stretches open. You grab the load and then simply remove the bag from your hand in reverse, like sanitary procedure with a surgical glove.

Beyond the awesomely functional shape, the thickness of the plastic is what makes the whole mitt action bearable. Even a double-ply grocery bag leaves too much texture to be felt, too much of an 'omigod I'm touching poop, I'm touching poop!' feeling. Anyone with dog poop removal experience is well aware of the magical range of textures the product can come in - I will refrain from discussing them here except to pull out the tired claim that the Inuit people have a gazillion words for snow based on each kind's unique characteristics. We all know dog poop could also benefit from a range of descriptive names, but I think I would need a cocktail in hand to engage in that level of creativity. I'm sure a quick Google - which I do not recommend - would provide some other fecal-focused mind's vocabulary list on this topic.

Anyway, the delight of the Mutt Mitt is the solid, defending, i'm-here-for-you-honey layer of plastic between your hand and his gift. The 'mitt' portion of the bag is doubly thick and black - so there are few visual reminders of the bag's contents once the flip and seal is complete. And if I may take one tiny step too far into the true experience of picking up poop, the double layer of black protects you from the temperature of the cargo, avoiding the little lurch of the belly when you have to admit you are not only picking up poop, but picking up steaming, body-temperature poop freshly escaped from your furry friend.

I have purposely avoided researching the Mutt Mitt's claim of degradability, knowing deep down that when I look it up the standards of biodegradability that I should be considering as I throw plastic into the trash are unlikely to be met. But I Love This Poop Bag. And so I will accept 'degradable' as a wonderful thing and allow my naivety to keep my guilt at bay.

The rambling length of the paragraphs above should show my love for these poop bags. But now I'm spoiled. I struggle with issues of right-and-wrong as I stare at the freshly stocked dispensers at the park and long to grab and go. I glance furtively around to see if anyone is watching as I grab one, two, three...never more than that! Well, never more than that in one passing. For a while I had only a few precious Mutt Mitts in my possession and carefully doled them out using the forthcoming Inuit guide to dog poop textures, judging the necessity of a mitt based both on quality of dropping and distance to trash can.

Now that I've started hoarding them, I have them stowed everywhere. In my purse, in my rain coat pocket, in my winter coat pocket, under my car seat, in my cup holder. I treat them like the precious gifts I believe them to be - when I remove each one I carefully fold it into a neat rectangular shape and slide it flat into my pocket. I feel a stab of anger and confusion when I see the Mutt Mitts that come out of my boyfriend's pockets - stretched and wrinkled and crumpled as if they were just another bag from the RiteAid. I secretly go behind him and smooth out the plastic, triaging and trying to give my little bag friend the dignity he deserves for the heroic service he offers.

I dream of one day splurging at the snooty pet store and buying my own case of Mutt Mitts, an endless stream of mitts with no hoarding and no fear of sharing. But c'mon - they're poop bags. Who can afford to spend their money on that?

UPDATE 2012: I have owned my own supply of Mutt Mitts for over a year. Last Christmas I bought in bulk and every dog owner I meet under the Christmas tree received a travel pack. I'll never go back.