emlocke

Category: Blogging & Internet

  • Been on Hiatus

    Hiatus: noun. a pause or gap in series, sequence, or process

    A break can last fifteen minutes, four days or two weeks. It can be a change in the weather or the jump to a new page. It could be an escape or a fortuitous opportunity. Breaks are required by law, taken by choice, made by accident, or stumbled upon.

    There have been a variety of breaks in the last six months of my life. I spent my winter break right back at school as a literary agent intern where I got my “big” break into the publishing industry. My brother and I broke our dad’s Donald Duck mug, and even though he almost never uses it, we hunted down a new one on eBay because it broke our sentimental hearts. I took an unanticipated break from school and spent the whole time wearing broken-in sweats and feeling like I was breaking all the rules. My broken computer hobbled along to the end of the semester, holding out just long enough for Apple to break out the Macbook, on which I am writing today.

    I took a break from blogging. I missed it. I missed the words and the thesaurus and the neat lines of text and two-pixel borders around images. I missed counting up hits and rolling my eyes at the most peculiar referrals.

    It was more of a pause, I’d say, in my capacity to write in any way that could satisfy my standards. I’ve had writer’s block that was less of a boulder or a wall and more of a yawning gap in the road, which could not be crossed for lack of poetic words or thoughts that followed uninterrupted paths of logic. I’d compose one sentence, but before I could finish the second, I’d be dwelling on the first again, tweaking and editing the bliss out of language by sterilizing the process. I felt detached from everything I wrote and that was the most lost that I’ve ever felt. My own thoughts blared inside my head with an indecipherable cacophony, creating a resonating throb, but no poetry or prose.

    At New Year’s, in the fourth grade, I bought a composition notebook and resolved to start a journal in which I wrote down one positive thing about every day. I lasted about six weeks, a stretch either much longer or much shorter than any of my other New Year’s Resolutions have lasted in the years since. A few times, I missed a day and made it back to the notebook, but once a week had passed, it seemed too late, past the point.

    I’m not going to let there be a point beyond which it is too late to return to the blog. I’ll give myself a break, a hiatus here and there, but it’s worth coming back and clicking Compose New Entry when inspiration strikes.

  • Lazy

    We are all imperfect. There are people in our lives who we hope we can count on to be forgiving, accepting, even endeared by our flaws. Sometimes they are the people who want most to believe that we have none, and they are the ones who are caught off guard when we falter.

    And then there are those who want nothing more than to flop over and lie nose to nose with you and say, without words, “No matter what, you’re okay with me.”

  • Just for posterity…

    A screenshot:
    Bracket
    Remember when my bracketology held second place on the Mount Holyoke Facebook? What I really can’t believe is that all of the NCAA players are probably on Facebook. I wonder if they have to abstain from the FB pools.

  • Part of this Complete Breakfast

    Results of novelty IQ test while watching Sex and the City: 107
    Results of novelty IQ test while consuming Quaker Oatmeal: 140

  • Kind of a Snob

    People have been talking about Ellen Lupton’s book on DIY – not Do It Yourself, but Design It Yourself, which Lupton produced with her graduate design students at Maryland Institute College of Art. At first I thought I just didn’t need another book full of projects that I don’t have the time to do, or don’t even want to do, but then I read this Washington Post article and took a closer look at the book and the companion website and now I’m totally into this DIY mentality.

    Lately, I’ve gotten it into my head that I want to make a quilt. After exhaustive hours browsing fabric and patterns, reading quilter’s commentary about techniques and materials, I’m really no closer to getting started. I don’t even know if I have the tools or the skills to accomplish the project that I have in mind (I’m kind of a snob. I don’t have the patience for starting with something small, and I know it’s a fatal crafting flaw.) Why not just buy a nice quilt with the features I’m attracted to? In the end, it would obviously be less time and energy consuming, it might even be more cost-effective!

    But that’s not the point. I want something that is exclusively mine; colors, patterns, dimensions and materials specific to the quilt I envision. I “long to put [my] personal imprint “on everyday items and products,” as Jeff Turrentine of the Post phrased it. Oh, and I also want to say “I made this!” All the time, I see all kinds of products and think, “I could make that” or “If I could make that, I would do it this way.” I mentioned how I’m kind of a snob, right? I want to design it myself. This book is just what I need.

    Design It Yourself doesn’t have a quilting section, but it does show creative types that we don’t have to settle for whatever is available in stores or online, it encourages us to channel our inner-designer, and assures us that we all have one in there. Encouragement. Another reason I need to DIY.

  • Linkography – Linguistics

    Lost in Translation
    Enter a phrase and click to see it translated into French, German and Spanish and back again. Something is often lost in translation, but sometimes something is gained.

    Online Etymology Dictionary
    Etymology is the study of the origins of words, the evolution of languages in sounds, spelling, meaning, even how they may have been broken down through slang or abbreviations, like the word blog.

    My Favorite Word
    My favorite word is estuary, which is the geological term for the wide part of a river where it meets the ocean and fresh and salt water mix. You wouldn’t think that would require a word that sounded so delicate, but when you think about it, an estuary’s ecosystem is very delicate.

  • Putting the Web Back in Blog

    I really don’t like the word blog. It’s not aesthetically unappealing, but the letters aren’t particularly graceful. The sound of blog has even less finesse. I usually like succinct words, but this single syllable sort of lolls forward from your throat like a slothful bubble. Blog sounds especially repulsive when spoken through tears, let me tell you.

    Blog is short for weblog, but that sounds clinical to me. It’s awkward to decipher all the letters that seem to have been assembled together to form a word that has yet to be definitively defined or understood in popular culture. It could be a collective verb, ‘we blog.’ But ‘we’ still excludes internet users who have never encountered a blog, or have encountered a blog but didn’t know what to make of it, or have avoided blogs entirely because they associate blogs with other, darker medias like, obviously, MySpace.

    But what is a weblog, if not a log of the web? That’s how I’m looking at the Firefox extension that I installed over the weekend: StumbleUpon. My brother warned me, “Install at your own risk, it’s addictive, you’ll just have to click the button again,” and it’s true.

    But if you’re bored with the internet, you need this extension!

    I had gotten bored with the internet. Once I told my mom, a compulsive Freecell player, that I couldn’t understand why she would rather shuffle those cards than ‘surf the net,’ as they say. Yesterday, I watched over her shoulder while she played Freecell (she hates when I do that) and sighed and said, “there’s nothing left to see out there on the web.”

    I knew that wasn’t true, but I needed a new way to find all that’s out there. Within an hour after installing this tool, I had fired off six e-mails, including two to myself, about links and sites that absolutely could not be missed.

    But I’m very fastidious about adding links to my bookmarks list, partly because I am an obsessive categorizer and partly because I know they will just waste away in there. Thus, I’m going to share the favorite sites that I come across, collect them like trading cards and trade them with my friends, and I am starting this week with some links to linguistics-themed sites, to go with my analysis of the word blog. It still doesn’t sound very nice.

  • Caught Looking – or – Why I Blog

    One snowy afternoon during winter term, I had the day off from my internship and I had sloshed through the slush for lunch. I was sitting in a corner by the window, eating by myself, letting a heating vent blow air directly up my jeans. I half read my book and half watched other people trickle in and sprinkle themselves here and there like delicate budding blossoms, some in tiny clusters, but many all alone, clinging politely to the ends of each table.

    At one point, a girl approached the table next to mine, ready to perch her tray on the corner. I glanced up from my book and our eyes met in one of those accidental ‘caught-you-looking’ moments. She was caught off guard, just for a second, but her tray slipped and her silverware clattered to the floor.

    She collected it all and moved on with her lunch before I could get up and help, but what I really wanted to do was catch her eye again and say a silent ‘sorry’ because I knew that both of us there alone in the dining hall, autonomous eaters and harmless people watchers, and we caught each other looking. I wanted her to understand that I understood what a surprise it was to meet someone else’s eyes in a room where all the solo eaters are trying not to meet each others’ eyes. I almost wanted to say, “Sorry I made you drop your silverware,” but I didn’t know if she would have understood that kind of apology.

    But maybe she would have understood. Maybe she would have looked me in the eyes and grinned and said, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” I didn’t risk it.

    But I think that’s why I blog. Because there is always a chance that someone is going to look, to risk getting caught, and read something that makes sense. I keep writing because I hope that something I say that nobody else understands will be crystal clear to a reader out there on the internet. Somebody will read and think, “I know what you mean” and just for a second, it will be like we’re eating at the same table.

    If I can affirm one thing for one person in my lifetime as a blogger, I will feel that I have accomplished something. I’m keeping a lookout.

  • A Thanksgiving Easter Egg

    My worst habit is my incessant need to highlight and de-highlight text as I read at the computer. It started when I tried to catch up on seasons of missed ER episodes by reading the lengthy Television Without Pity descriptions, all on white background, and my eyes started to burn. The highlighted text had a blue background that went easier on my exhausted retinas. Ever since then, whenever I’m reading something on the Internet, I highlight sections at a time, sometimes drawing shapes, sometimes to a rhythm. I can’t control it.

    I tried to put a stop to it before I came back to school junior year because I knew all the mouse-clicking would drive my roommate crazy. She would say, “you’re highlighting again!” as I stared at pages of The Electronic Canterbury Tales, my face bathed in LCD-glow for hours at a time. Eventually I managed to wear myself down to only doing it on the silent touchpad mouse, but she would still laugh at me. It is a really ridiculous habit.

    But if I wasn’t constantly dancing the cursor around, I would miss stuff like this: click on the left question mark above techinical difficulties turkey’s head at the end of the Thanksgiving 2005 Homestar Runner cartoon.

    STRONG MAD: CAN I KEEP IT? (Bubs’ concession stand, which he is wearing)
    STRONG BAD: No, you can’t keep it, now go put that thing back.
    STRONG MAD: IT FOLLOWED ME HOME! (He ‘absconded’ it and wore is through the Thanksgiving Parade.)
    STRONG BAD: Uh, yeah, that’s not true.

    That’s called an Easter Egg, celebrated all year ’round. Nothing says Happy Holidays like a Homestar Runner cartoon of mockery.

  • Mount Holyoke E-mail Server, Cover Your Ears

    Over the summer, my commercial e-mail account was shuffled back and forth between webmail and client application one too many times. None of the messages remembered where they were supposed to show up and in what order, so the entire archive evaporated. Like the Classics Department joke that Ellie tells about the Greek philosopher who was all “I think, therefore I am,” until one day, when someone asked him if he wanted coffee or something. He said, “I think not,” and vanished into thin air.

    It was my own fault, but I decided that if I couldn’t remember what I was missing, than I wouldn’t miss is that much. The only e-mail that came to mind was the confirmation I received after I registered for Outward Bound. And the only reason that one stuck out in my mind is that I printed at least two copies and memorized the first three lines and sometimes repeat them to a nursury rhyme tune when I try to coax myself out of bed at the beginning of a particularly long day: “Congratulations! You are about to embark on…”

    There are times during every semester when I hold my breath every time I open my school e-mail. [I really hope the server doesn’t hear this and jinx me, but] sometimes, I wouldn’t even freak out too much if that account evaporated somewhere into the world wide web, too! It wouldn’t be my fault that I haven’t read and responded to every one of the six e-mails one of my professor sends every week. I wouldn’t feel guilty about filtering through messages from clubs I’m not actually a part of, beyond the contact list. I wouldn’t have to assemble the puzzle of appointments with people who want all of my waking hours for themselves!

    I’m thinking about setting an auto-response message: “I think not.”