4:02 pm
Only someone who knows me very well--well enough to have spent more than one summer around my household--can appreciate the willpower I've mustered up this year when it comes to....kittens.

Truth be known, I was getting tired anyway, and the feline population around this place has steadily risen from two to eight since my move here in 1998. Now I am faced with the difficult task of finding homes for four of them....but I digress. Yesterday, while putting a shipment away, I heard the all-too-familiar sound of a kitten chorus eminating from the Special Procedures area. When I got to the source of the multitude of mews, I was greeted by a most heart-rending sight: there must have been six of them. They were all about four weeks old. To the far left was a brown tabby, and beside him was a tortoiseshell, and next to her was a dilute torti with long hair. There was another tabby in the back, mewing in the wrong direction. But the kitten who really caught my eye was the little colorpoint. I will call it a boy, since it (now "he") looked very much like Nakori from last year's brood. He was the most vocal of them, and was using his littermates as stepstools to get closer to where I was. He looked squarely at me. It was a Direct Hit.

"What"--you might ask--"do you mean by a 'direct hit'?"

I'll tell you what.

For some reason kittens are my Cryptonite. I am typically safe as long as I don't touch them or, most dangerous of all, make eye contact. Kittens have little "death rays" which they project from their innocent-looking eyes, rays which turn me into some kind of mutant felo-humanoid species with all of the protective instincts of a mother cat. I guess it is what one might go so far as to term a "host/parasite" relationship. You know, there are species of birds which knock the eggs out of other birds' nests and lay their own.

I believe the cowbird is most famous for this behavior. I don't know why the hell a bird would leave its nest if it's setting on a clutch of eggs, but birds must do this, or else the cowbird would never get its chance. When the legitimate but unsuspecting parent birds are out on errands, the cowbird quickly squats in the nest, lays an egg, and takes off. Talk about hit and run! It isn't even necessary to knock the other eggs out of the nest because the chick which emerges when incubation is complete is a behemoth by comparison to the other baby birds. The littler birds don't have a chance. You'd think the parent birds would get a little suspicious when the ever-hungry offspring of questionable lineage surpasses its parents in size. Maybe they're too tired to notice, or maybe the dad bird doesn't want to get confrontational with the the mom bird ("honey--you've been fooling around, haven't you?") In any case, the ploy works, and the kid eventually leaves the nest to carry on with the family tradition.

There are insects which deposit eggs in their host and the host becomes a lobotomized, living nursery for the young. There is some kind of parasitic creature which does the same thing with a certain species of crab, residing in a little trapdoor of the crab's carapace where the eggs would normally be stashed.

I think I've made my point.

A similar phenomenon seems to happen to me if I get caught in Kitten Eye-Beams. That little siamese had caught me in his cross-hairs; in fact, I think he'd smelled me coming. (Sniffs axillary region with concern.)

Fret not: I was able to break the gaze before it was too late. Luckily, these little guys had a foster home, so I didn't even have to feel guilty about anything. As a matter of fact, as I went about putting things away, that litter of kittens made so much racket that I found myself becoming--gasp!--annoyed! Yes, it's true, I confess. I was glad I didn't have kittens in my home this year. I'd had enough to keep my mind occupied and I was already tired.

Eventually the kittens settled down and fell asleep in a furry pile of dangerously potent adorableness.... I finished my business and headed back to my office. I had escaped.

That's right, folks: I did it. I was momentarily captured in The Beam and have lived to tell about it.