Love means never having to put your cat in the microwave.

Selected excerpts from recent phone calls, emails, and discussions with various friends regarding my kitten, Isabelle:

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Izzy is fabulous. She’s adorable and sweet and perfect. She kind of gets the crazies sometimes, but she’s cute enough that she has a sort of built-in Get Out of Jail Free card. Kind of like Britney.

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She and I have a new game. I drag a popsicle stick around in mad little circles on the carpet, and she attacks it like Denmark. Then I toss the stick away, about 7 feet. She bounds after it and makes it her mission in life to pick the thing up in her mouth and bring it back to me immediately for more mad dragging. Circles. Toss. Retrieve. Circles. Toss. Retrieve. 25 times. It's especially funny when I toss the stick onto the linoleum, because it's very difficult to pick up a popsicle stick from linoleum when all you have to work with are several tiny teeth and a conspicuous lack of thumbs. She gets So! Intense! when she thinks she's not going to be able to get the thing off the tile. At one point she got so carried away, she broke the stick in half. She looked at me like, "Um?"

I think she might be a puppy with a hormone imbalance.

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How’s Izzy? Oh, she’s peachy. She has an extraordinary overabundance of energy, and has recently taken up a new hobby involving unrolling all the toilet paper in the house. I am not amused. She is.

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Izzy, for reasons unknown to God and man, launched herself at full speed through the air at the toilet today while the cover was up, and I actually caught her in mid-air before she landed in the bowl. It was a very, very close call, and I attribute it to my cat-like reflexes. And my spidy sense.

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I came home for lunch today, and there are leaves everywhere. Izzy is growing up to be a plant-killer. I thought it was funny when I returned from Kansas a few weeks ago (when my mom was taking care of Isabelle) and Mom had put her normally-next-to-the-fireplace plant up on the kitchen counter. Now I understand why.

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Izzy is a terror. Have I mentioned this? Honestly. She's discovered the kitchen counters (and is now big enough to jump onto them) and so I am constantly following her around with a squirt bottle. She also keeps jumping up onto an end table and launching herself bodily into a hanging plant, grabbing hold of a vine, and sliding down like a little kitty fire fighter. Not cool.

The other day I found her on top of a door. On top. Of a door. Near the ceiling. She was pacing precariously on a 2 inch wide surface 8 feet in the air. I just looked up at her, like, "Good luck with that." I’m not sure how she got up there; it’s possible she can fly. Do you want a cat?

She makes up for it, though, by coming over and sitting next to me on the desk and leaning on me, like, "Don't go anywhere, 'kay?" and then gives me kisses. Her favorite thing is giving kisses. Well, and string.

And plants.

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[Re: “I want to marry your kitten. You could do our wedding photos!”]

Oh, I've done weddings and they're hell, even under normal circumstances. And in the case of you marrying Izzy, I would have to deal with the bride constantly disappearing into the refrigerator and yanking on my camera strap and chewing on the centerpieces and skinning the plants and balancing on the tops of doors and licking the wedding guests' noses and ears and cheeks and eyebrows.

And it would be hard to keep track of the cat, too.

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Seriously. When is she going to grow out of the phase where she wakes me up by standing on my face? Every. Morning. "MRAWR?"

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Isabelle is driving me insane. I love her (don’t I?), but she's trying my patience. I came home today to devastation and plant carcass scattered about the room. I just cleaned up her leaves AT LUNCH. And I'm getting tired of refilling my squirt bottle, which really now needs a sniper scope.

And she won't quit climbing on the damn door. This time, she jumped all the way to the ground from there. As I type this, she is jumping up there AGAIN. Why? There's nothing up there? Nothing has been put up there since the last time you got up there? And you're just going to meow for ten minutes like you're stuck in a tree until you decide to jump to the ground again and risk shattering your teeny little bones and WHY DO YOU MAKE ME WORRY?

I am so apologizing to my mother later. For everything. Ever.

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I don't know if she's very smart, or very stupid. She won't stop swinging from the plant vines like Kitty Freaking Tarzan.

In the past five minutes, I have sprayed her with the squirt bottle 47 times, yelling each time. The yelling is kind of amusing, because it started out normally: "STOP!" "DON'T!" "NO!" "BAD!" and the usual. But I got so bored with that, that to keep myself amused, I've started saying things like, "GAH!" "BLOO!" "GRAAAH!" "NOINK!" "ALPACA!" and "I SWEAR TO GOD I'M GOING TO FEED YOU TO THE WASHING MACHINE AAAAGGHHH!"

Everything in my house is wet. Including the cat, who is soaked, and does not seem to mind. I think this is a new game for her. I point the squirt bottle at her, and does she run away? NO. She runs toward it. Like a moron. And she gets wet. And then she runs around the room like a pinball and launches herself into the plant again, all "YEE-HAAAAW!" And again with the squirting.

She is having such a good time. I'm about to have an aneurism.

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I've significantly pruned and transplanted the majority of the kitten plant, until the lowest tendrils hang more than four feet off the ground. It has not stopped her. Happily, she has become distracted with a strangely focused attack plan for GenV. (Happily for me and my plant, not for GenV.)

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Izzy: (looking innocent) "What?"

GenV: "Go away."

Izzy: "Play first!"

GenV: "No."

Izzy: "C'mon, pleeease?"

GenV: "No."

Izzy: "You know you wanna. RRRAWR! FEAR ME!"

GenV: "Whatever."

Izzy: "I don't think you're putting your heart into this."

GenV: "Please die."

Izzy: "Okay, but I WANNA PLAY FIRST!"

GenV: "I like how you're still pretending I care."

Izzy: "Don't make me step on your head."

GenV: "..."

Izzy: "I will."

GenV: "..."

Izzy: "Fine." (pounces) "HaHA!"

GenV: "I'm going to go sit in the closet for awhile. If you come after me, I will remove your whiskers and use them to sew your ears shut. Do you understand me?"

Izzy: "You're no fun at--OOH! LINT!!" (bounds away)

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My best friend and her boyfriend were in town for the weekend, and they brought their cat, Zoe. Zoe spent two and a half days on top of my fridge, GenV will be in the closet until Labor Day, and Izzy spent the weekend pretending to be very, very large. She's perfected her growl, which is an uncanny likeness of a vibrating cell phone. Don't tell her I said that.

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I was beginning to think the spray bottle technique was working with Izzy, but now I'm not so sure. I don't think she really interprets it as a form of punishment, because she doesn't get that distressed about it. She just sort of wanders off to lick her coat for a half a minute before resuming whatever Bad Thing she was doing. Maybe she just thinks it rains a lot in my apartment.

My plant is now one third the size it used to be. The kitchen counters are not safe. Nor is the stove, kitchen table, or trashcan. She doesn't believe me when I tell her I'm going to put her in the microwave.

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Just now, the Terror tried to jump up on the kitchen counter (again), and I went to spray her. From here. The stream did not reach far enough, so she looked at me and ran directly toward me so that it would reach. It is so difficult get mad at her.

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Also, Izzy left me a nice big pile of severed plant parts for me when I got home. There were more branches on the floor than are left on the plant.

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God**** cat.

I am not having a good day. I tried to drown my sorrows in a bowl of carbs by making pasta for dinner. I had just begun eating it quietly, minding my own **** business, when Isabelle comes FLYING through the air (out of nowhere! how does she do this?) and Lands. On. My. Pasta. She flipped the whole **** bowl over so it goes flying end over end and my pasta goes everywhere. In my keyboard, in my afghan that I had wrapped around myself in a self-pitying manner, under my desk, over my desk, into the carpet, EVERYWHERE. The bowl flips over and over in slow motion like a **** football in January.

FYI, you can curse at the top of your lungs until you are blue in the face, and this cat will not flinch, go away, or look otherwise humble.

I am aware of the hilariousness of the scene, and that is why I have not broken down completely.

Thank you for your self-restrained non-laughter. I have accepted that it's funny, so you may laugh if you want to. I haven't laughed yet (actually I just finished a very Woody-Allen-meets-Chandler-Bing-like rant at Izzy wherein I listed all the ways she makes me crazy, and something about not being able to tell up from down because the craziness has permeated my inner ear, and then I realized I was wasting my breathe because she didn't understand a word of it and was probably thinking about feathers and bubbles while I went on and on), but I will eventually.

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It's non-stop with Izzy right now. This morning she tried so hard to catch all the falling bits of water she found in the bathroom today that she fell into the bathtub with me while I was taking a shower. (The water thing is clearly not the way to go with training techniques. She just does not care.) That one made me laugh.

Then she climbed onto my bedroom desk and attacked the bulletin board, where she promptly removed all the pushpins one by one and then jumped on a large pile of stuff, knocked it over in its entirety with a great deafening crash, and sent a box of additional pushpins flying everywhere. This, of course, was like Christmas for her as she launched into the pushpin fray in order to capture, torture, and destroy each and every one of them until they gave up the location of their pushpin leader. Somehow she managed not to end up looking like a Chia Pet with pushpins instead of grass, and I had to eventually grab her by the scruff and lock her out of the room in order to find all the pins without her attacks. That one did not make me laugh.

I have carpet cleaners coming today while I'm at work. I moved all my furniture into the kitchen. I don't even want to know what she's doing with that jungle gym.

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I came home today and was delighted to see NO severed plant limbs on the floor. I was so proud of her! I even picked her up and kissed her and gave her scritches behind her ears and told her she was a good girl.

A half hour later, I discovered that she is now simply storing the plant parts behind the couch.

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I went shopping today and—GET OFF THE DAMN COUNTER, YOU LITTLE TURKEY!

You want a pet, right? Would you like mine?

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Do you hear that? She’s purring. She’s sleeping on my shoulder, and wakes up every once in awhile to lick my cheek and lean into me. I love her so much.