We both went for eye exams today. This is the third time we saw the same doctor, Kristi G. She has the same fat black but pleasant assistant, too.

Tom still has a faint trace of a cataract growing and my OH is borderline. She did an extra field vision test on me and I haven’t lost any vision on the edges, so I don’t officially have glaucoma. She thinks it’s likely that my OH will remain the same all my life but we’ll keep a watch on it every year.

There wasn’t much change in my vision but I’m still going to get new glasses because every two years our insurance pays for new frames and I like variety. I’m going to go with the same thing… transition progressive lenses. Instead of going with designer frameless frames, I’ll probably get more colorful frames with no nose pads. We’ll pick them up tomorrow after we go to the lab.

After the eye doctor, we went to KFC. I got chicken and he got a chili dog. As soon as I sipped my cold raspberry tea I got a killer toothache that needed ibuprofen. It was a very strong and steady pain. The thing is that it wasn’t even where she was working, and sometimes the pain seemed to move. I thought it felt like it did start on the upper tooth she worked on, then moved to the lower back tooth she also worked on, and then finally settled in the front where she didn’t work at all. I don’t get why I still have this. Last night I woke up to pee and the pain was so bad in this area that I had to take ibuprofen. It seems that the longest I suffered after having dental work done was two weeks. Tomorrow will make one week, so if I’m not better by the 24th, I’ll call Kathleen, even though I would rather not see her until March if I’m not surprised by hearing from her before then.

I was really disappointed to see that not only do my books not have any reviews but Beneath the Smile hasn’t sold any copies yet. But then I noticed someone started a copy through KU and KOLL which I enrolled in. With this, your royalties are based on how many pages of the book the person reads. So far they’ve read 18 pages. It’s kind of cool to see their reading progress along the way.

Still not sure if I’m going to submit anything else for publication until after NaNo at the end of the year.

You know how random thoughts of the past sometimes pop into mind? Sometimes it’s something negative, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it just is. I was telling someone how the poorest of the poor in the US still live in luxury compared to those in third-world countries. Then I added, “And M Dorm really was the Princess Dorm,” as those in Estrella Jail called its dorm for “seggies.” It was fairly new at the time and devoid of writing on the cell walls.

In the midst of cold showers, horrible food, nightmarish mattresses, no sleep, some inmates wanting to get down my pants (including a few guards), a few hotties in uniform, and a lot of homesickness, came the writing on the ceiling. LOL, my favorite cell, if you could call it that for someone who had no choice but to be there at the time, was on the end of the upper tier in the Princess Dorm. One time I was on the top bunk and if you sat upright you could reach the ceiling, even with arms as short as mine.

Not even jail derailed me from my journal. I would order notepads through the commissary, write a few pages at a time, and send them home to Tom. I later typed them up once I was released. Because I had to do everything longhand, my thoughts would sometimes be a lot faster than my hand in which case I took notes on the ceiling just above my head, haha. Laughing, I said to Tom the other day, “I wonder if they’re still there.” I doubt it, though. After 18 years I would think that it would get to be such an eyesore even for the guards that they would have been repainted by now.

During one of the times they shuffled us around, I was in another cell before I returned to that cell, only this time I was on the bottom bunk. I got a kick out of phony Mary above me reading them and trying to make sense of what they could possibly mean before I finally spilled the beans and told her I was the one who wrote them.

Kim and I have become “friends” and I have mixed emotions about that. I suppose karma is going to get me for it sooner or later (unless I’m Kim’s karma), and that I’m just as bad as she is by pretending to be someone else; this Krista S, while she lets me believe she’s this gorgeous guy. The question is what to do about it. Should I keep going as is? Ghost her? Tell her who I am?

And just why am I doing this? Oh, I guess just because I can. I’m curious to see how long I can keep it going, and maybe I hope to get a little information too, at some point. I’m curious to see what I can find out about myself, be it bullshit or not. It’s too soon, though, to be bringing up people we’ve dealt with online and subjects that may get her talking about me. Maybe Krista can eventually tell Kim that Jodi’s asking about her, LOL.

Her younger sister Tracy died last month unexpectedly at age 34. I don’t know why, though. All I know is that she was just as fucked up as Kim. Aly said the whole family was except for her older sister Carol. The karate instructor who dumped her husband for a woman.