After having stayed up last night until well after 4am, it's no exaggeration to say that today finds me t i r e d. So, after claiming the car from Kirk when my morning class was done, I swung by China Garden for some takout Chinese and then headed home for a quiet girlie afternoon with no stress.

One of my secret indulgences is that I occasionally read chick-lit. The first book was way back in 2000 with Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner, which I promise is not anywhere near as scandalous as it sounds. The second was The Devil Wears Prada, way before it ever became a movie. And the third was In Her Shoes, Jennifer Weiner's second book that also, for fun, loosely incorporates the main character from her first book as a periphery character at a certain point.

Of what did my afternoon consist, then? None other than the chick-lit film adaptation of In Her Shoes, which I further confess that I own. I think Toni Collette, Cameron Diaz, Sean Feuerstein, and Shirley MacLaine make a great ensemble cast for this fun, quirky movie about two sisters who have absolutely nothing in common.

After lunch, then, I headed into the bedroom with my laptop, curled up in the bed with the shades drawn just in case I eventually decided to take a nap, and settled in for this afternoon flick. Pretty soon (read: less than 2 minutes later), Diva wandered in. She stood at the side of the bed, looking up at me with her plaintive eyes like she always does, which is her way of waiting for an invitation to hop up on the bed and join me. One pat to the velour blanket on top of the bed is all the invitation she needs, and she jumped up in a flash. Then, as I was laying with my head propped up on a pillow to watch the screen, she finagled her way into the little crevice between me and the laptop, then moved to block the screen entirely with her body, so that I could do nothing but attend to giving her a snuggle rub on her head and cheeks for a good, long time. (I had to pause the film, of course.)

When I was finally able to scooch Diva away from the screen, she sat herself down on her haunches in the little crevice and just stared at me with her wide blue eyes. She does this often -- sits and stares at me, I mean. I would call it creepy if she weren't so darn cute. I'm especially helpless to her gaze when the blacks of her eyes are contracted so large in a darkened room that they barely evidence the light ring of blue surrounding them. Add to that the soft, downy white of her chest, and I'm a goner.

So here we were, two girls with our girlie flick between us and tons of pats and snuggles. Sometimes I get so caught up in her cuteness and how much I love loving on her that I can't help swooping her close to my chest in a tight squeeze of love with a big kiss smacked on the top of her head. Unfortunately, she hates this. Besides being beautiful, Diva is also skittish. She has been this way, Kirk says, since the day she was rescued from an alleyway behind an opera house when she was just weeks old. Who knows what she saw of the big, mean world before she was rescued and brought, matted and mewling and fearful, into the pet rescue center? (The rescue from behind the opera house is how she got her name, by the way, and not an indication of any snootish personality.) To this day, Diva shrinks from being held too close or feeling too closed in, which is unfortunate for those of us who want to suffocate her with squeezes of love!

I confess that I've succumbed to my need for a Diva-squeeze fix twice today (so far!), but she has thankfully stayed close and allowed me to coax her back to my side for more docile strokes of love. This, I know, is because she trusts me.

I sure do love that girl and our cozy girlie time right now. No boys allowed -- and that means you, Solomon! :)