These days, I work in a cubicle that is roughly the size of an upscale restaurant's wheelchair-accessible bathroom stall. I make this comparison because I know you can appreciate it; we have all used the wheelchair-accessible stall at least once when no one was looking, just to enjoy the roominess as well as the considerably cleaner sink and guaranteed-to-be-stocked toilet paper dispenser.

So now you can picture my workspace, and over the past weeks I've been organizing it and making it my own. At first, I simply focused on finding economical places for storing my purse and water bottle, a box of tissues and an assortment of healthy snacks. You may not approve of snacking at work, but let me tell you, people in cubes are always generously bringing in tasty treats from their weekends and vacations. This is part of cube culture, and it's hard to resist taking just one cookie or one piece of candy. Yet I feel certain that if I had not resisted snacking from the huge box of salt-water taffy brought in by my work neighbor after his beach vacation last week, I would now have to be stretched and pulled through my standard cube entrance twice a day.

At any rate, now that the essentials are taken care of, I've begun to add some homey touches to my cube. These ought to reflect my personality and taste.

But to my surprise, I recently purchased a nondescript, vine-type plant in a floral teacup planter. Heretofore, this was precisely the sort of kitschy item that would never have caught my eye.

I had stopped at my local Safeway to pick up a roaster chicken for dinner on the way home from work, and had to walk by the instant hostess gift display in the floral department. The little teacup planter called to me. I didn't even check the price — I just had to have it.

Arriving home, I dropped my recycle bags of groceries on the counter and waved my teacup of vines at my husband's eye level.

"Look what I found for my cube at the grocery store!" I announced. He was appropriately speechless.

"It's … it's a … wow! A plant in a mug," he said.

"A teacup planter," I said. "Won't it be great for my cube?"

"Sure," he said, but his voice went up at the end like it was a question. I must have looked disappointed.

"Yes!" he said, more enthusiastically. "If you think it will."

In the ensuing weeks, I have glanced over at my teacup planter and I have determined that spending so much time in my cube has undoubtedly had a chemical effect on my brain. I hypothesize that it has overly stimulated a sector of the parietal lobe, which was last fully activated when I was 6 years old and I got my first dollhouse for Christmas. Now, it seems, I can only perceive and appreciate items in miniature.

It is a good thing I work for a major research university, because someone is going to want to study this latent, cube-induced effect.

Suddenly I find myself stopping in front of store window displays of tiny items, such as puny picture frames and elfish figurines and quaintly lettered inspirational sayings on diminutive easels. I seem to think certain things are adorable that I might not have found adorable before — and perhaps are not even adorable now. I can no longer discriminate. If it is smallish, or reduced, or confined and compressed somehow, I have a disproportionate liking for it. For example, last week I briefly stopped to admire a pug dog on the street in Baltimore.

Unless I get some help, I fear that in time I might start dressing like the office Oompa Loompa. But to my new way of thinking, that's not entirely bad, because they're awfully cute.