I leaf through most every junk catalog that comes through the mail slot. Everything gets at least a perfunctory viewing no matter how wretched or boring. The mail slot is a mechanism by which dull reading material becomes instantly fascinating simply by virtue of entering the house through a notch with a tiny brass door. In the past I've found myself wanting the most terrible and unwantable things. I was a precious and fussy child, possessed of a girlish hippophilia and overly emphatic preference for tea, and when one day I happened to flip with quiet consternation through the almost breathtakingly tacky Lillian Vernon catalog while keeping an ear on the crucial durations of popless silence of my microwave popcorn I became convinced that a tea cozy shaped like a sitting cat was an object I couldn't do without for one moment longer. Consequently the will to cozy became a sort of worldview, an unquenchable drive to sheathe. Other cozyless household items suddenly began to look somehow naked, even shamefully so. How could we leave our spare toilet paper roll just sitting out like that? It absolutely needed a cylindrical crocheted hat to wear. Decorum demanded it if we were to call ourselves human. To become involved in the cozying lifestyle is to see the world with different eyes. To fall prey to compulsive cozying is to cover things up with ugly yarn for no reason, to look at common everyday objects and see only disgraceful bareness, as if the world consisted of practically nothing but the genitalia of unconverted savages.