Got some air freshener, a round decorative rock with gold paint and sequins, and a pink gemstone-tipped pen at the dollar store. I could use the rock for hot plates and pots as well as for decoration.

We stopped at McDonald’s before the dollar store where he got a burger and I got chicken nuggets. It was good even though it was a bit of a wait.

When we came home we hemmed my new purple sweatpants with fabric glue, and other than some sawing and engine gunning, it’s been a pretty quiet day. Still a lot of loud vehicles, though. I still don’t get why there are so many. It’s so unnecessary with today’s technology yet Tom said they passed some ordinances against vehicles that are too quiet in some places for pedestrians’ safety. rolls eyes If you’re dumb enough to cross the street without looking first then you’re kind of asking to be hit.

Remember how I said several entries ago that a few people attempted to leave good reviews on my books and they wouldn’t go through? Well, apparently I’m only allowed visible reviews as long as they’re only one star. Yeah, “Written in a very elementary manner,” someone going by M wrote on Campus Games. Funny too, because when I read the half a dozen other reviews they’ve left, most of which are also one star, they weren’t exactly a very good writer themselves given their lack of punctuation and caps.

Kind of wonder if it’s Maliheh or someone connected to her. She wasn’t a reader but that’s the thing; you don’t have to actually purchase the item in order to review it.

Either way, I get that everyone gets negative reviews at times and I’m okay with that because I don’t think negative feedback is going to affect my sales one way or the other any more than positive feedback because I’m not famous…or infamous.

I replied with: I’m sorry you didn’t like the book. No one’s ever said (at least to me) that I write in an elementary manner, and I’m pretty sure Amazon wouldn’t publish me if they felt that I did, but I understand that one style doesn’t fit all and that I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. Still, I thank you very much for giving it a try!

I got to thinking about the negative book review and then it hit me… How does someone leave a review on a book that hasn’t had any purchases or borrows yet, according to my book reports? Campus Games is a newly released book. Maybe if it’s lent to someone the buyer knows it can escape my reports or something like that? I don’t know, but out of curiosity, I sent a message to Amazon asking if it’s possible that not every borrow or lend shows up on my report.

I’m really starting to suspect it could be Maliheh. They go by just “M,” they have no profile picture, and the few things that have been reviewed by them do seem like things she may get. The poor writing style fits in with her as well. The first review goes back to last August.

But if it’s her, why that book and not the one she inspired? Maybe the idea was to “punish” me with negative feedback for the email I sent her teasing her about using her real name in Evil, and to throw me off her scent by leaving the review on a different book. It’s not important either way but being the naturally curious person that I am, I can’t help but wonder if it’s someone I know. The biggest mystery is how the hell they reviewed something that’s not showing up on my reports. I wish Amazon wouldn’t allow anything to be reviewed without a verified purchase.

Anyway, if this was an honest-to-god review and not just someone messing with me, I will admit that I first wrote this particular story in 2004 when I wasn’t as experienced as a writer as I am now. But I thought I did some pretty serious editing on it before submitting it.

Anyway, it’s been absolutely freezing. I feel like I’ve been freezing my ass off for many months. I wish it would hurry the fuck up and warm up already! It is going to be warm enough for motorcycles next weekend which sucks because I’m going to be sleeping in at that time as I flip my schedule for my appointments. Chances are I’m going to be woken up that day and probably Friday too when the trash and green waste trucks make their way in. I swear I’m never again going to have a bedroom so close to a busy street or any street for that matter! As I was telling Tammy, forget trying to find quiet. Quiet just wasn’t meant to be for me. But I can definitely do better than this and no possible friendship with Kathleen is worth sticking around for. I don’t even know what “let’s keep in touch” means. Does it mean “let’s get together once or twice a month” or “send me a Christmas card every year to let me know how the year was for you?” Tom thinks it’s the latter. It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m fine with whatever she wants. I’m just tired of being cold so much of the time!

But not as tired as I am of the anxiety. I started to feel it well up in my chest earlier, but a cup of Sleepytime seemed to help it. Tom thinks it’s simply because it’s Sunday night and I wish he were right, but if it’s anxiety over anything that’s going on, then why didn’t I have this feeling when we were struggling financially? I know it’s tied in with either the medication or the perimenopause, I just don’t know which one is most responsible for this shitty feeling. Maybe all those articles really have a point too, when they talk about how fast food and sugary treats induce anxiety. I’ve had two candy bars these last two days, plus I went to McDonald’s.

Now I’m going through the dilemma of whether or not I should skip tomorrow or just see if I can tough it out and see how bad it ends up getting. If I could just tough it out, I could lose an easy 5 to 10 lb. But there is no reasoning with myself once it gets to the point where my heart is racing and I’m terrified. Once it goes from a shitty feeling to a scary one, I’m pretty much fucked and it’s no way to live. I’d rather gain weight than go through that. So I guess I might skip tomorrow or at least cut my waiting time in half.

Another dilemma I’ll be facing in June is whether or not to tell A that I’m going to skip weekly to prevent this from happening in the first place or ask that she lower my dose.

If I can make it to the end of the month without a period then that will mean I’ve had just one in 9 months. Really wish I could get to November without any periods because then I’ll know for sure if it’s the meds or not making me anxious. It will be interesting to see what my estrogen levels are when I’m tested in June. I keep going back and forth in my mind between the causes. Both the meds and the peri make sense but they also don’t.

While I’m on the subject of life’s little mysteries, how about peeling back in time to 1996? Pretty sure they said in court it was something like 1996 or 7 that I sent the freeloaders the threatening letter but that they didn’t have enough evidence to go after me then. Then how does sending journal excerpts suddenly turn an incident that’s lacking in evidence into an incident that has sufficient evidence???

I’ve been feeling more and more alienated by Tammy even though I know I shouldn’t. For all I know she doesn’t contact many others any more than she does me, and with us not having much in common and her not being the greatest writer and therefore easy to understand, it’s probably better this way. But how much does she really want me around? As in near where she lives? Maybe the fact that she doesn’t pester me online shows that she wouldn’t do that in person either. It’s just that she can’t get from me online what she could get from me in person. She had me babysit for her, for example, those few months I lived in Connecticut. Had the Internet existed then, she couldn’t have used me to babysit online. The only way to know what she’s going to do is to live close to her if we do.

When Alexa told me that Ocala was 40° last night, that pretty much got that place off the table of possibilities. That’s almost as cold as it is here. It was 55° in Cape Canaveral and 59° where Tammy lives as well as in Fort Lauderdale. Now that’s more like it! It really would be best to get as close to the coast as we can afford and not go too far north.

I was quick to say we probably couldn’t afford the high-rise apartments on the beach my parents lived near while we were looking for a place and deciding exactly what town/city to settle in, but maybe we could if it included utilities.

I also wonder… Is Tammy’s place really that much quieter than this place or does she just not notice noise as easily as I do? I’m very hyper-aware of sounds. I didn’t hear anything the times I was visiting but I was only there for a tiny fraction of the time she is. Maybe we just have different definitions of what’s noisy and what’s not because she said there were some trucks that use diesel but because they’re going so slow they’re not that loud. Well, they sure are loud enough here even when they’re sitting there idling. I realize that everybody has their own tolerance levels when it comes to noise. Obviously, most people don’t mind loud car stereos otherwise they wouldn’t still exist after all these years. But when I hear them booming down the freeway, I most certainly do notice them, deaf in one ear or not, and I definitely consider it noisy. Most people might have considered all the frogs in Auburn ribbiting up a storm after a rainstorm to be a noise nuisance, and while they were definitely just as loud as Jesse’s mutts, they didn’t bother me in the least.