emlocke

Category: Lately

  • Not the next ad campaign

    Checking out at Key Food with five bottles of flavored, carbonated water and nothing more

    Male Self Check-out Attendant: I drink those all the time.
    Me: Mmmm-hmmphhh.
    Attendant: So many of them. I love them. Especially the peach flavor?
    Me: Yeah, definitely.
    Attendant: I sweat flavored water.
    Me: I don’t even like regular water anymore.
    Attendant: I think I pee flavored water.
    Me: Uh?
    Attendant: Too far? Too far. Sorry. Thanks for shopping at Key Food! Have a good night.
    Me: Thanks, you too!

  • Where we appreciate a few tears of laughter, too

    I’m used to associating the sound of heels on the back deck stairs with special occasions of the refrigerator corsage, photos in front of the fireplace, breath-a-lizer variety. Because when else did I wear heels? I feel older when I hear that sound. I’ve been feeling older, in an unsettling, exhausting way, all week, after hearing from Jill that her dad died, making plans to go home for the funeral, realizing that I’d have to sit by myself at the church.

    I made the no-mascara call before I’d even gotten out of the shower, but I’d also passed up one of those pocket-sized packets of tissues—the ones I go halfway through and then save in a drawer somewhere forever. I couldn’t find the drawer full of half-used tissue packages, so I rushed out the back door without any sort of drop cloth for my face.

    I heard my own shoes on the deck and I thought about going back because I felt the nerves in the roof of my mouth trembling. I paused on the last step, pinching one eye shut, biting down on a chunk of my cheek, trying to tell if my nose would start to run, wondering “what was I thinking, no tissues?”

    I got in the car anyway, after a moment. I don’t know how to attend funerals. I guess that’s lucky.

    The ‘older’ feeling settled and faded later, at the Rumpf’s house. I felt like I was taking a dare when I splashed rum into my Coke. We studied a picture of our Girl Scout troop at our last meeting, our senior year of high school. I swear it seemed like I was looking at a photograph of something that hadn’t happened yet, because all the five years since then haven’t changed anything.

    (Nothing important, at least—I’m glad I’m not still straightening my hair to the quick.)

    I’d forgotten how quickly time passes in that house. Hours go by and I just assume that all the clocks are wrong because it can’t possibly be 5 or 8 or 11 already. I could hardly remember what all had gone on, I just knew that I’d been distracted, delighted, thoroughly warm despite that chilly thermostat setting for . . . hours, apparently.

    By the very, very end, when I hugged and held on to Jill and her mom and then her brother at the door, I felt like my own clock had been reset. I sort of patted myself down, assessing my emotional state. Still older and still a little sad, but absolutely settled. Jill and her family and her home have always restored me to me. It’s comforting.

    As I felt my way down the driveway, toeing for the path in my dress shoes, I thought, “didn’t I come to do the comforting?”

  • It wasn’t “please excuse the interruption, can I offer you a lozenge?” either

    I’m thinking it would behoove me to learn some phrases in American Sign Language. Not because I’m deaf in one ear or because I’ve forgotten what little I learned when I was younger and I did a brief stint in speech therapy, but because I need something to say to strangers who try to talk to me but don’t pick up on nonverbal cues like silence and avoiding eye contact and walking away to convey my aversion to their voices.

    A long time ago, we used to joke, “No hablo ingles!” as the response we’d use to get out of talking to someone, so I guess I could memorize that phrase in a handful of languages and drop them at random. But in this city, what are the chances that the person I’m trying to put off would speak my ‘other’ language? Good. The chances are good. ASL would be less chancy because it’s just not that common outside of the non-hearing world. Also, it freaks people out. I’ve seen it. Whenever people start signing to each other in a public place, everyone notices and everyone, no matter what language they speak, is surprised.

    A smidge of ASL would have been very useful on my way home from work last night. I was reading Maus. I sensed someone looking at me and then this guy sort of oozed into my peripheral vision and across the space between us until he was looking over my shoulder at Vladek the mouse. He said into my left ear, “are you actually reading that or are you just putting up the facade?”

    Only, he pronounced it “fack-ade.”

    As much as I wanted to say, “Nope, I’m not really reading this, you saw right through my fack-ade,” signing something in ASL would have gotten rid of him a whole lot faster, no matter what I said.

    Later, on the Metro-North train, I turned on my laptop and it hummed its single note. The woman next to me paused in conversation on her cell phone, leaned over my left shoulder to say, “could you put that thing on mute or something?” and proceeded with her chatter.

    Yeah, I wanted to sign something to her, and it wasn’t “I’m deaf.”

  • Let’s take all the fun out of casual dating

    Because Facebook has already taken the fun out of recreational stalking and Hopstop has taken the fun out of navigating five major U.S. cities, one state, and two small suburban regions.

    I’ve got three browser windows open while I plan tomorrow’s social rendezvous. One is for Yelp.com, where I try to put other reviewers’ 1- through 5-star ratings and comments about pricing, clientele, and atmosphere through the “Emily Filter.” One is Hopstop.com, where I’ve entered the street addresses for a handful of bars/restaurants to calculate travel time from work and from my apartment. The third window opens the website of whatever venue is up for consideration, where I’m hoping to find happy hour menus.

    I’m spending as much time choosing a place to meet as I will actually having dinner and drinks (especially if I pick this place, where so-and-so on Yelp complains about slow service . . . )

    I think I need another website.

    I need a website that combines Yelp reviews with the semi-standardized data from Zagat Survey and also feeds info from individual restaurant websites. I want a calendar feature to help coordinate everyone’s schedules. I want to see listings based on desired mood: casual date, intimate date, double date, friend date. I want street maps with marked subway stations and I want to be able to enter the subway lines that both parties will be riding on the way to and from the place and highlight the most centralized locations.

    And I want to be able to check off an option like, “We might not want to ride home together” and see route alternatives that won’t force me to prolong an awkward evening while I wait for a train. I also want names and addresses of surrounding places in case “We might be up for dessert.”

    I want this site to crawl my Facebook friends list for contact info and generate a friendly e-mail to attendees that says something natural like, “Let’s check out this place” or “Haven’t been here before, want to try it?” I want to recapture the pleasures of spontaneity and experimentation and the simple value of good company over the statistics of social dining.

  • ‘Inside my skin, there’s an empty room’ and no MRSA

    My mom works at a public school and a couple of weeks ago, she forwarded to me and my brother a general notice that had gone out to all students, families and staff members about the risks and prevention of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA is a mutated variation of a very common and usually harmless bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotics and can cause fatal infections. My first instinct was to roll my eyes. My second instinct was pure pride because my mom is a totally awesome guidance counselor.

    My third instinct was to diagnose myself with a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection.

    I’m not a hypochondriac by nature. Only if I’m really not feeling well and worrying about it do I become susceptible to the power of suggestion that leads some people to believe they’re suffering from medieval ailments or Kennel Cough or something. But for some reason, I spent the better part of the day absolutely convinced that I had MRSA.

    I had a blemish on my shoulder that was sort of red and sore, but not at all abnormal. I cleaned and covered the spot and in the morning, it looked much better. I took that as a sign that an incurable infection was diving from the surface of my skin and soaking into my blood stream. I freaked myself out so much that my face and neck started to flush, the first sign of a fever that would have me hospitalized for sure.

    Plucking at the last thread of logic in my fraying mind, I took an extra multi-vitamin and applied another band-aid. At the gym that evening, I wiped down the machines before and after I worked out. By the time I got out of the shower, my skin was clear, my imaginary fever had broken, and I declared myself cured.

    The whole thing reminded me of a project I did for my Graphic Design class when I was a junior in high school. We had to design album art for a fictional band or a compilation CD. I put together an “Angsty Girl” mix and based my design on images of stained cells under a microscope lens. In my mind, “angsty” female artists broke down in their music, exposed their wounds and flaws and mutations, became small and then magnified themselves.

    I borrowed cell slides from my biology teacher and scanned them into the computer. The dye colors were electric and appealing. I had glassy lavender human cheek cells, fresh green plant cells with vacuole polka dots, bacteria outlined with dramatic red membranes.

    Nobody understood my project at all. My teacher asked, “is angsty a word?” I had really hoped that my metaphor would impress this one guy in my class. His talent made me envious, inspired, and a little turned on. Despite the fact he must have thought me a complete flake, he was so patient. He just kept asking me to explain it again—”okay, so why the cells?”

    Oh, whatever. No one even buys CDs anymore.

    What’s so amusing about looking at these now is the playlist. My “Angsty Girls” included Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco Alanis Morrisette, Sarah McLachlan, Jewel (all arguably appropriate, but so totally cliche); Edie Brickell, Patty Griffin, and Marry Me Jane (surely selected because I didn’t think my peers would have heard of them).

    And the “angst” I tried to express—if the guy whose respect I’d wanted to earn had patted my head and said, “Oh, how adorable,” I would have deserved it. I know my favorite lyric in Silent All These Years was “what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?” even though in the very next line, Tori Amos is practically threatening not to get her period so the guy with the jeans will know that she’s pregnant. That’s like the difference between “oh, I’m so angsty with my emotions and my deep thoughts” and “your deep thoughts are nothing compared to my DEEP THOUGHTS.”

    Even though Jewel might be the least angsty of these angsty girls, I used two of her songs: Barcelona and Absence of Fear. I was still playing this CD in college, listening to Barcelona on long drives: “Won’t somebody please, hold me, release me, show me the meaning of mercy, let me loose”; and Absence of Fear when it rained or if I couldn’t sleep: “There is this hunger, this restlessness inside of me.”

    So maybe angsty isn’t a real word, but the sentiment has endured. The same lyrics still stand out when I play these same songs. And I still think my cellular metaphor is fitting.

  • Whatever you want, or whatever you would have wanted

    On the night I get the call, the one that I’ve been putting off in my mind as though I had any control over the matter, I’m already tipsy. I’ve just applied my mascara, separating my lashes as I thicken them. I only answer because Jill has called from her home, where the phone number is blocked from caller ID. “Unrestricted” on the screen of my pale pink Razr tempts me to unflip my phone because it feels like a dare.

    I hear Jill’s voice. It’s full of truth. I am, it seems, instantaneously leaking from the eyes.

    The thing is, these aren’t drunken tears drowned in white wine. They aren’t even the obligatory tears that I expected to shed when I answered this anticipated phone call. Jill says that she has called because she wanted to let me know, “Dad died tonight, just a few hours ago,” and I say “Oh babe,” though I’m thinking, “Why now, why now? Why tonight? I just put on my mascara.” I say that last part, the part about mascara, the part about a type of cosmetic that smells sour when it’s gone bad, out loud.

    I hold the length of my left index finger against the lower lid of my left eye while Jill explains the logistics of her father’s peaceful passing. After she mentions the date of the funeral, I stop listening. I can think only of what I will clutch in my hands during the ceremony. My free hand falls away from my damp face and opens and closes in my lap. I admire the precision of the inky line of mascara streaked from the knuckle at the midpoint of my index finger, down the metacarpal, clear to my wrist. My hand looks quite thin. I realize this with distress, not vanity, and in the same moment I recognize the mixture of grief and gratitude in the pit of my stomach.

    Jill is the next one to say “Oh babe.” I chuckle, though my voice is heavy with the tears clinging to the back of my throat, and say, “I know, I can’t believe I’m crying and you’re not.” She admits that it hasn’t hit her yet. The grief, the reality for which she has tried to prepare herself, hasn’t hit her yet. I tell her to call me the moment it does, as soon as she needs to, as soon as she needs me. She says that someone from the funeral service will be arriving at the house soon. She has to get off the phone because her mother needs to make a call.

    I tell her to give her mom the largest, longest hug that she can. “And tell her it’s from me.” I’m crippled, even as I give these instructions, by the understanding that I cannot describe over the phone the sort of hug that I intend. There isn’t time to talk about this hug. There might not even be time to give this hug. There is one for Jill, too, though I don’t even bother to tell her about it, because I know it won’t be enough. And even if it were, I’m not there to give it to her.

    We hang up and it takes a minute for me to realize that it’s up to me to call my own family and tell my mom what has happened. That it has happened.

    I have never shared this sort of news. I can’t remember a time when I’ve had this type of responsibility, this much responsibility. I don’t feel old enough, tactful enough, brave enough, anything enough, to be making this phone call. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? While the phone rings, I try to figure out how my mom would tell me what I am about to tell her. She answers right as I remember all the calls that Jill is making tonight.

    There is no right way around, so I just say the words. The weight on my heart doesn’t lessen when I pass the heavy knowledge on to my mom, nor when she relays the news to my dad, who I can picture sitting at the computer or in the recliner by the window, curious about the phone call at this hour.

    We talk for a few minutes before I start to cry again, and then I cry for a few minutes before I flush out all the wine laden tears and gulp a couple of raw sobs. When mom says, “oh babe,” I practically interrupt her to confide that I’m glad it’s not me. My lungs start to shudder. She tells me it’s okay, I’m okay. “We’re fine,” she says, an answer to an unasked question. “We’re all fine here.”

    For the moment, that’s enough, because it has to be. The statement offers little comfort, only confirmation. It doesn’t change anything.

    I tell my mom that I’m still going to go out with my roommate. She says there’ll be plenty of time for tears in the coming week and next weekend. We exchange our usual Love You’s before hanging up.

    My roommate has been waiting in the living room, watching the TV on mute. When I come back down the hall, she looks up and says, “I’m sorry, Em.” I expel a great sigh, squash the heels of my hands right into my eye sockets and rub, blotting cosmetic powder and gel and grease across my cheeks.

    “I’m just going to wash my face and start over.” I flip open the compact mirror I keep in my purse. We’ve spent a few minutes in silence before I miss the company of the scripted dialogue. I wag my hand toward the television. “Unmute it. Come on, unmute it.” I welcome the renewed source of sound, but I don’t hear the words. I only hear the three trembling notes to the refrain in a song I was listening to earlier, while I tried to figure out what to wear. I have to make a conscious effort not to hum out loud while I apply a new coat of mascara.

  • Is it Valentine’s Day yet?

    Boo.

    Shh! They can’t know I’m here. Who? The macabre beings of Halloween. The ones who are out to get me. Obviously.

    I’m stepping away from Ghost on TV (there’s nothing scary about Patrick “I Love You So Much Its Scary So Let’s Hold Each Other” Swayze) to share with you my affection for Halloween “Spooky Friends” Peeps. Put them in the microwave with graham crackers and some chocolate. They’re like s’mores dressed up in costumes.

    I also love Homestar Runner. I keep preparing myself for the finale this Flash-animated comictoon. I’m afraid it will be forgotten because everyone is distracted by YouTube and streaming TV episodes. Fortunately, the jibblies are back again for ‘Ween 2007.

    I wish I liked Halloween. I wish it could be another one of those holidays for showing the people you love how much they mean to you. By sharing candy.

    But what I’m really trying to say is “Halloween Is Scary So Let’s Hold Each Other.”

  • John Muir said he never saw a discontented tree

    In the Ojibwa Creation Story, the muskrat swam down into the ocean to collect a paw full of soil from somewhere far, far beneath the surface of the water. The turtle carried the soil on top of her shell, letting it spread across her back and expand to become the earth. Anable Basin, an artificial body of water dug out during the Second Industrial Revolution, does not a happy habitat make for courageous muskrats and selfless turtles today, but it has been given A Tree just the same.

    A Tree for Anable Basin is a sculpture of a tree formed with a wire frame and a textured aluminum skin and “planted” on platform that will float off Hunters Point, Queens. Native plants rooted in real soil and solar-powered lights make the Tree habitat-like, if not habitable.

    Obviously, this piece is visually and thematically comparable to Roxy Paine’s Three Sculptures in Madison Square Park, but its installation in a body of water is striking in a different way. I pass the stainless steel trees (two lean into a shadeless embrace on the center lawn; a third is dead, “rotting” on its own off to the side) and boulders in Madison Square Park and notice how easily they might go unnoticed. The assumption could be made that those manmade elements were added to the park’s landscape to replace natural elements that were somehow lost to urbanness, the way an artificial limb fills a physical void on a human body.

    The sculpture in Anable Basin cannot be mistaken for a surrogate. Trees do not take root in water. It doesn’t belong out there, it doesn’t make sense, not as wood or as aluminum. The installation speaks to issues of rightful land use and celebrates environmental regeneration, but as its floating form beckons eyes past the shore, it also offers a silent invitation to what will likely be the next frontier in landscape architecture.

    Water surface area and volume provide hopeful opportunities for wind- and water-powered energy, but will there be any resources left to conquer once we take to the sea? The artificial island looks like a green mirage floating in an industrial waterway, but as it sways with the tide, an eerily foreign body, it also resembles a silver space station drifting in the darkness beyond the sky. To what oasis will we flee next?

    Tree‘s current location is temporary. The sculpture is meant to float unanchored so it can travel naturally through New York City’s waterways. This plan will raise some arguments on practicality from city officials, but I hope that the tree meets an audience beyond Anable Basin. The figure is beautiful; equally graceful and bold. The unfolding branches almost look like they’ve been arranged too carefully. In silhouette, the shape is too balanced, too elegant. And what’s most stunning is that it was modelled after the real thing.

    “Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!“—John Muir

  • I’d like to introduce you to THAT GIRL

    I’m going out for drinks with my roommate and her coworkers after work tomorrow night. Someone in her department is leaving for a new job, so they’re getting together to do that farewell, good luck drinks thing. The guest of honor asked everyone to bring the siblings and roommates and significant others that she’s heard so much about. I’m looking forward to it, partly because I know Caitlin’s been waiting for her chance to prove to me that some of these people really do exist, but mostly because I have a feeling that this is going to be a room I can work.

    Send me out with a group of people from my own company and I’ll totally clam up. I hate being that girl who falls on the last resort topics; either talk about work, or talk about talking about work. But somehow, I always become THAT GIRL.

    I basically need a fourth wall. A fourth membrane will do, if the place is crowded. With a bit of a social moat, I can’t not be charming. I’m not trying to be conceited. It’s not like I don’t have several volumes of awkward blunders in my archives, because, seriously? A greatest hits edition is in order. But the animated small talk and the repartee and the banter? I’m good at that. I have stunned my roommate with the way I nimbly impart woes and mirth to clerks at the beauty counter and gas station attendants. She tells me I was thisclose to charming my way out of our broker’s fee, although I don’t think my powers are quite that forcible.

    Caitlin is excited to introduce me, finally, to the cast of characters from her office stories. She’s really excited. Like, almost as excited as she was the night we both went to the grocery store at 10PM and waited in the same line because only one register was open and the cashier was like, “are you two together?” and she spent the whole walk home wondering if that meant paying together or together together.

    We still talk about that sometimes. “That woman totally mistook us for a lesbian couple!” she marvels and I’m like, “right, right, because single straight chicks never go out for pints of ice cream on Thursday nights.” She says, “that cashier looked at me with respect.” She says she felt like sort of a bad ass.

    I’m going to try really hard to get her to tell that story to her coworkers at happy hour tomorrow.

  • The lines of communication are open, if blurry

    I don’t know when my home town school system started issuing e-mail accounts and web space to the staff, but by my junior year of high school, probably about half of my teachers had set up class websites.

    They were all pre-formatted on a generic template. Clip art graphics at the top depended on the subject: the wobbly line drawn globe on the social studies pages; chalk and a slate for math classes; a test tube emitting glassy bubbles for Chemistry; maybe the globe again for Earth Science. The illustration options were limited.

    On down, students might find course-related links, the attendance policy, the date of the first test of the year (or the previous year, in some cases). More than a few featured that stick figure construction worker and promises of “Coming Soon!” Zealous teachers added edifying quotations about hard work or knowledge, or the emblem of their favorite sports team, copied and pasted into pixelated distortion. And everybody threw their school district e-mail address up at the end of the scroll.

    The point is that all of this was very experimental. Teachers dabbled in web presence the way most people tweak the e-mail font and signature settings on their first day at a new job. You mess with the text size and color. You pick out what will go at the end of composed messages and what will go at the end of replies and forwards. You either make it easy for others to figure out how to contact you by phone or you figure out how to make it nearly impossible. You might even scroll through those “stationary” styles, just to see what an e-mail would look like inside a circus tent. And then you’re like, “interesting idea, nice to have the option—not for me.”

    Not surprisingly, a lot of public school teachers had a similar reaction to their new webmaster roles. “Interesting idea, nice to have the option—not for me.” Only they had already referred students to the website and it remained active, if orphaned.

    One weekend, I sought out one of my AP teacher’s contact information via our class website and e-mailed her to ask a question about an assignment. I never heard a reply, so I improvised my way through and then approached her about it at our next class. Not only did she criticize the way I had opted to complete the project, she was also completely flustered, even offended, by the fact that I had sent her an e-mail about it.

    It got around soon after that she had gone to someone in the administration and complained about having to use an e-mail address at all. It made her uncomfortable because it gave students too much access to her personal life or something. It was a violation of her privacy. I still wonder if anyone, before then or since, clarified the concept of e-mail to this otherwise fantastic teacher, or . . .

    Who knows.

    That incident was pretty much the best indicator I ever had that I was ready to graduate high school and go on to college where I could e-mail professors at all hours of the day and night.

    But in the last six months, it’s become clear that what I was really ready for, all the way back in 2001, was my current job. What started with that errant e-mail to my teacher has ended with a steady stream of text messages between me and my boss.

    I forgot my cell at my desk one evening during my first or second week. He heard it beeping or buzzing or something and sent me an e-mail so I wouldn’t worry over its whereabouts. I thought, “How nice of him!” and then, “Terrific. Now my employer knows that I can’t keep track of my personal items, and also, that my cell phone is pastel pink.”

    He hasn’t held either against me, because my pink cell phone is filled with messages like: “Not feeling well. Can you go to launch?” “Did you see my sunglasses @ the booth?” “Put a cold compress on your forehead and feel better!” “Quick theater question. Check your email.” And “Halloween marshmallow peeps!!!”