it’s just midterms.
think of the weekend! halloween costumes, ice cream, shoe-shopping, and much love.
silly things like midterms are reduced to such insignificance when considered against the greater scheme of things.
21 comments October 26th, 2009
one of the gifts i got for my birthday (as you can see, i have abandoned the practice of chronicling my 21 gifts) was a stethoscope. a pink stethoscope, which the people close to me would know i have always wished to possess, if only for the sole reason of listening to this mysterious pulse that i have in my abdomen. it throbs very strongly and visibly when i am lying down, and i take a very strange liking to asking people (close to me) if they would like to feel my pulse!.
i’ve always wanted to listen to this pulse through a stethoscope, so imagine my disappointment when i was finally presented with my very own (pink) stethoscope, only to find that stethoscopes dont carry the sounds of pulses.
so what i do now is listen to my heartbeat instead, which makes the stethoscope happy (it’s doing what it was meant to do), but makes me sad (because i can hear how strange my heart feels). the murmuring of my heart sounds fragile and defiant and weak. there is no conclusion to this — just that my sadness is begetting more sadness, and this cyclical madness is preventing me from getting many things accomplished.
as always, i have been angry. and in my anger, i do stupid things. or maybe things that seem stupid right now, but will later prove to be just good. the problem is that i cant get the scents out of my head. both scents — both that of dead things that reside in moments a) hastily fondled, and b) hesitantly circumnavigated and then recklessly plunged into. both lie hanging in my closet. i am scared. i fear that i may have ’sealed the deal’, but in many ways it’s a very liberating fear. at the same time, i’m nervous about the sobriety with which i am approaching these things. honestly, why do i care?
sometime almost a year ago, i grew up and then i grew down within a disrespectfully short period of time. this time, it’s the same. i’m oscillating between two stable steady states, with or without the aid of some big bad entity. is it really so hard to love and be loved?
this, by the way, marks the official end of time traveling.
a password protected post will be coming up soon. when i figure out how to NOT let google cache pick up my protected post (ha ha ha), i will write it. until then, please drop me a line (or two, or more, depending how chatty you feel like) at quitequaintly[at]gmail[[dot]]com if you’d like the password. do know that i am perhaps the pickiest person in the world when it comes to privacy, so if you would really like to read the private post, please be at least somewhat transparent with your identity. i know most of you are strangers, but i’d still like to know who’s reading my lesser-veiled thoughts.
31 comments October 19th, 2009
we always walk into heartbreaking things, or slip into them. i was sitting in starbucks today with the usual mid-week brain cramp, staring into space, when a young blonde woman paused to rest in the center of my vision, and for some reason she brought me back to earth, and i caught sight of her clear plastic bag of apples just before she turned away. the apples reminded me of my TA from one of my classes last year. the professor had introduced them at the front of the lecture hall in the first lecture, but i wasnt paying attention, so i never put the names to any faces. inadvertently i picked his section. i walked into the little room in the math building one day, and there he was, all curly hair and crinkled white shirt like he’d just rolled out of bed reeking of intelligence and manliness. i couldnt place my finger on who he reminded me of. i later realized it was timtam he was reminiscent of — although it must be said that i wouldnt think of timtam as reeking of intelligence or manliness, ha ha ha — and it made me miss timtam, who was in aarhus at the time. but timtam likeness notwithstanding, i looked forward to section every week. cos he — the TA — was so smart. so scatterbrained but so smart. he was my first columbia crush, i think. i later chanced upon a really weird photograph of him straddling the merrill lynch bull, and that made me giggle. finance guys with horrible penmanship… just cant run away from these patterns. briefly i wondered if he could be gay; with this school, you never really know. but then i guess i didnt care too much if he was gay or not — inspiration fornicates asexually. he’s graduated now, and i have another TA whom i have not met. i wonder what he’s doing now. and i meant to write this post a whole year ago, the first day i met him, but i eventually forgot. there were no apples around to remind me.
24 comments October 15th, 2009
i wasnt sure if i should go on with this museuming of my birthday gifts, because things are different now, and perhaps it wouldnt be such a good idea to dwell. or memorialize.
but everything was just so wonderful, perfect, and tangible. instead of the loud and wayward alcohol-infused surprise party that was supposed to happen, we quickly changed plans, took off, and ran away into the woods. we rented a car and drove up — and it was all simply sublime, the way the sunset shimmered between the autumn trees and the headrest of the seat hummed contentedly as the evening fell away behind us in curves. at one point, just as i’d almost crawled into a lazy sleep, i was momentarily jolted awake to look at a deer just beyond the windscreen. i was grumpy at the sudden awakening, but secretly happy that i got to see the deer. it was grazing on a small meadow, with its head held high in the air, and it looked like something out of a book. that weekend, everything felt like something out a book.
we even tarpau-ed some fried rice and char kway teow from my favorite Malaysian restaurant, and ate while watching the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy. how is that not perfect?
29 comments October 11th, 2009
