The strangest thing has happened to all of my shorts. I first noticed it last week when I finally dragged them out of their winter seclusion in my storage room that's so big it could be a bedroom for a very short roommate. Yes, I have a large storage room in my apartment. This is one of the many reasons why a bout with unemployment won't scare me away from it despite its hefty rent.

But to get to my point, I had to drag my shorts out of storage. Now, I have a very elaborate filing system. To the untrained layperson it may appear as if I have simply thrown those objects I am too silly to throw away into boxes (or never bothered to unpack them) and then piled the boxes in precarious, quivering piles in the very large storage room. When nosey visitors open the door to the very large storage room they invariably look at me with a quizzical mixture of horror and condescension.

In truth, the only entity aside from me who isn't displeased with my arrangement of the very large storage room is Noudnic the Cat. He gets very excited every time I open the door, which isn't that often, and he immediately bounds in, transmogrifying into the vicious untamed beast his ancestors were when they ran wild over the Elburz Mountains in the days of yore. This is when he's not sleeping on his back in the bathtub (I wish I had a digital camera). In any case, he leaps over mountains, lurks in caves, and dodges avalanches (caused by him, might I add). Once while hunting he attacked and eviscerated an entire colony of old hair elastics I had kept from the days just after the days of yore when I wore plaid and ripped jeans and had hair that grew past my titties. I'd saved them because I thought they might be useful one day. Brave, regal Noudnic.

This acknowledgement of the inherent usefulness of all used objects permeates my entire outlook towards happy housekeeping. It is my philosophy that if an object has been useful, one should simply leave it precisely where one used it last because it will undoubtedly be useful once again. This applies to all objects. CDs should remain outside of their cases in tall unsteady stacks on my desk because I play them on my computer. Plates should stay on the coffee table in front of the TV because that is where they are utilized. Envelopes from hateful bills need not be discarded: they, or the bills themselves, can easily be transformed into wacky cat toys in one smooth crumple-and-toss movement. C'est simple comme ‹‹bonjour››.

This is a philosophy, you realize, not laziness as some have deemed it. One of these naysayers is my future husband, Ajay. He objects to my practical house-keeping style, believing for some reason that special places should be found for every object in a household and that things should be placed in these places when not in use. It's a theory. And it's also very easy for him to accomplish such a meaningless task since he is a model/Bollywood star who has servants to do these things. So whenever he scolds me I simply say, "Well then, fantasy fiancé, send over some of your fantasy servants!" We are then both so stimulated by the charged atmosphere that we make sensual, passionate love in the piles of clean laundry on my bedroom floor. All of this probably goes a long way towards explaining why housecleaning remains a fantasy in my household, along with other fantastical things, like future husbands for example.

In any case, last week my goal was to extract my shorts and my expired passport from the very large storage room. I also thought I would take advantage of the opportunity to put some order in the room, much to Noudnic's distress. Fortunately I was saved from this task because the shorts were on top of the whole domestic topography. The passport was in the first box I opened, along with some term papers from my undergrad when I wore ripped jeans and plaid and I had hair that grew past my titties. I'd saved them because I thought they might be useful one day.

And so as I walked to the passport office in my brand new fashion sandals and my brand new fashion blisters, I noticed something odd about my shorts (Ha! You thought I forgot what I'd written in my first sentence). Their waist appeared to have shrunk over the winter. It's very strange. The shorts are no shorter than they had been last summer. I cannot explain this odd phenomenon. Perhaps there's something about the atmosphere of an overheated, closed storage room that causes cloth waists to shrink. I am completely flabbergasted. Has anyone else noticed anything similar?