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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

I'm writing a new blog, No Poster Girl, about my life with severe myalgic encephalomyelitis, which I first developed in 2004, and which has left me bedridden since 2007.

About my handle: Before I was born, my mother had a dream that when the doctor held me up in the delivery room, I was a little gray kitten instead of a baby. We had three cats when I was small, and my first word was "kitty." It's pretty much cats all the way down with me.

I worked in the food business for a dozen years, with stints cheesemongering and demoing at Whole Foods, making planograms as a category management intern and working on the club store business (Costco, Sam's, B.J.'s) as a tiny cog in a vast cereal machine at Kellogg's HQ in Michigan while getting a food marketing degree at Western Michigan U., and finally as a marketing jill-of-all-trades (retail data analysis being my main specialty) for the marketing order that supported hundreds of California peach, plum, and nectarine growers.