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.