I don't want to be negative. I just write that way.

I woke up excited because it's my niece's birthday and we're having dinner out tonight and I get to put on this beautiful pair of Chloe shoes:

First I had to get Kitten to the vet. Well before that, I had to find him then wrangle his 16-lbs. of floppy, fighting fur into his carrier. He knows when I'm even thinking "vet" because he started wrestling as soon as I picked him up followed by fifteen minutes of woman vs. beast. I won but then the car wouldn't start so I guess Kitten really won. He went back to napping and I spent the morning and $166 at the car dealer getting a new battery installed. On the good side, they had Vogue and People magazines in the waiting area (the last time I was there it was Auto World and Business Week) so I got to read all about Oprah and look at pictures of TomKat who's daughter, Suri, was photographed wearing an outfit that cost more than my car battery. (Except the whole reason for the story was to dispel rumors that Katie spends way too much money on her daughter's clothes.) Damn, I'm being negative again. It just comes naturally, like breathing.

Speaking of negative, I've mentioned I'm dating a man, Big Guns. What I'm about to admit to isn't exactly news, but dating isn't a way around the pain of divorce. Oh no. In fact, it's like I'm juggling the divorce and then I've gone and thrown another ball into the air. Clearly, in the early stages of feeling intensely rejected by my ex, the attentions of Big Guns felt affirming--"You think the way I smack my food is cute?" But now? It's just another relationship that requires work. I can write about this because Big Guns only reads Flex, the Harley parts catalog, and ThunderPress, a magazine that's full of beauty shots of bikes being straddled by women with very, very large bosoms which seem like non-sequiturs to me -- the girls and the big tits. Anyway, it's kind of refreshing dating a person who doesn't have a PhD in literature like the ex and who'll never finish reading something of mine and ask if all the grammatical errors are a post-modern literary device.