emlocke

Category: Lately

  • Oops, I forgot to hit “Publish” before I left the office on Friday

    There’s all this construction going on in my building. Sweaty guys with muscle tee tans mingle with the business casual types in the elevators, their bare arms standing out among all the light blue shirtsleeves.

    One of the men working out on the roof wears an Oakland A’s cap every day, and a matching red safety harness every day since someone in the building questioned the safety practices of the construction workers. Now all of the guys wear red or yellow harnesses with carabineers hooked in to the hefty mesh loops at the back. At the end of the day, the Oakland fan unfastens the buckles on his harness lets it fall from his hips. He steps out of it and slings it up off the tarred roof by the carabineer, drops it in a heap of tools and leftover scraps of metal and cement that the crew will leave out overnight. I have yet to see any type of restraint clipped into one of those carabineers.

    So, the men still drape themselves over the edge of the building, stretching beyond the safety netting like it’s just getting in the way, craning above bare iron rods that are waiting to be dressed in cement and could easily three-hole punch a human body that dropped on top of them. Just, now they’re doing it while wearing harnesses, snug, over their faded, frayed jeans.

    My manager can’t understand a thing the construction guys say. Once, he spoke to the one in the Oakland A’s cap, commenting on his aerial feats, suggesting that he might want to be careful out there on the eaves of the 21st floor. Oakland didn’t express any confusion, just beamed and said, “Yeah, bro” and then, apparently, tilted his head in my direction.

    “I have absolutely no idea what that meant,” my boss said later, “so I just said, ‘Yeah, yeah‘ back but I was really like ‘Okay.’ It’s quite possible that he has asked for your hand.”

    “Too bad I’m a Yankees fan,” I tell him, even though I’ve always kind of liked the idea of a love based on a rivalry.

    To protect the carpeting, there is a layer of industrial seran wrap down on the floor. Footsteps on the plastic sounds like bubbles popping in a sheet of bubblewrap. The best is when the mail cart comes, because with all four wheels rolling down the hall, it sounds like someone’s dragging a body down a strip of bubblewrap laid out like a red carpet.

    The sound reminds me of this website, Virtual Bubblewrap, which a coworker forwarded to me once when everyone in the office was stressing out. That sort of confused me because usually when I’m really stressed out at work, fondling plastic isn’t what I want to do. What I want to do is wrap plastic around my face and secure with packaging tape. At least bubblewrap would cushion the impact, should I ever decide to jump off the twenty-first floor.

    But I’ve got no reason to consider doing so; just plenty of reasons to sit tight here at my desk. One of them is perched on the balustrade outside my window, singing a spanish song that I don’t know and wearing an Oakland A’s cap.

  • I am a person who is writing about coffee and chocolate milk

    All summer, I’ve been brewing coffee before bed and leaving the silver pot in the refrigerator overnight so it’s chilled by morning. 

    The sputtering gurgle of the coffee maker and the steamy, earthy smell has come to instill corporeal quiet every evening, late, right before I realize how much I need it.  That coffee scent emerges from the kitchen and pushes its way down the hall.  It finds me wherever I am in the apartment and rests its warm weight on my eyelids.   I lures me back to the kitchen.  I switch off the coffee maker and put the hot coffee pot on the top shelf in the fridge.

    By morning, the aroma will be lustless.  Just cold.

    It is a ritual based on the weather and my temperature sensitive tongue, but there is something unexpectedly empowering about making my coffee at night.  When I push that button and the red light clicks on, I think, “that’s right, because I said so!”  I’m not just drinking stale-ish, artificially sweetened coffee every morning, I’m choosing to be a person who drinks stale-ish, artificially sweetened coffee every morning.  (And I’m a person who drinks the whole 14-ounce pot.)

    I keep the coffee filters in a drawer in the kitchen.  I use my thumb and index finger to peel the top layers off the stack of filters, and then I blow down gently on the edge to separate just one.  Every night, this makes me think of milk money. 

    Each student in my kindergarten classroom had a white envelope with a milk carton sketched on the front and their first name and last initial printed on the back.  The letters were drawn with polka dot serifs. 

    My teacher, Mrs. Robertson, taught us to puff air across the top of the envelope to open it without risking papercuts on our tender little fingertips.  Every morning, a different pair of buddies got a turn to carry the bin of milk orders to the cafeteria.  At snack time, a lunch lady would return the envelopes, emptied of their change, alongside a crate of petite milk cartons. 

    On Fridays, my mom gave me a quarter, a dime and a nickel to drop in my flat paper milk carton and told me to put it in the stack of 2% milk orders.  Some kids ordered milk every day.  Some kids ordered chocolate milk every day.  A lot of kids ordered chocolate milk on Friday.  I ordered milk once a week.  Friday only.  2%.  No chocolate.  Mom said.

    Once, though, I blew down across the top of my envelope and dropped in forty cents and then I added my envelope to the stack of chocolate milk orders.  When the lunch lady rolled her cart into our classroom, I plucked a brown and white carton from the plastic crate. 

    And I became a kid who drank chocolate milk through a skinny red straw at snack time on Fridays.

  • For all the same reasons they shouldn’t have given me a car at 16

    About six weeks ago, one of the guys in my department resigned to pursue a career in architecture, leaving his sunny, spacious office vacant. Every time I spoke with my mom on the phone, even from my cubicle, she started and ended the conversation with a comment about moving in on the territory. I had a hunch that I’d get to relocate, but my manager was travelling for two or three days, so I forced myself to wait it out until he returned and granted permission to transplant myself and my PC to the new digs.

    Since then, I’ve done a little bit of decorating and reorganizing.  Also, I have accumulated under my desk: two pairs of shoes and one pair of rain boots; four pictures frames from T.J. Maxx that I keep meaning to take home and hang in my bedroom; one umbrella; one sweater coat; one trench jacket; a pair of shoes that I have to return to DSW; a bag of six swim suit separates that I have to return to J. Crew; a miniature sewing kit; three pairs of pants that I need to either have altered or alter myself using that sewing kit; and a set of watercolor paints.

    I’ve been in the office after hours or over the weekend a few times recently with a little time to kill. This is evidenced by the scatter of watercolor attempts on an empty shelf against the wall. The next shelf up holds a few stacks of books arranged strategically to emulate this experiment in language by Nina Katchadourian. I already have pins in one pair of the to-be-hemmed trousers; in fact, I brought the sewing kit into the office last weekend so I could try them on with the right pair of shoes, which now ‘lives’ under my desk.

    Yes, I have made myself right at home in the office. I already spend most of the work day barefoot. A few weeks ago, I got caught tweezing my eyebrows in preparation for a hair appointment. I haven’t fallen asleep in my chair yet, but I guess it’s only a matter of time before I start picking my nose with my feet up on the desk.

    I won’t go into what had to be cleaned out of my station wagon when it was totalled or out of my Honda when I handed it down to my brother. At least there’s no way I can push my office down a hill and into a tree if it runs out of gas.

  • I guess fleeing the country probably isn’t the answer

    My brother Will recently introduced me to LifeHacker.com. Click on that link at your own risk, as you will not just be embarking into a new browser window. LifeHacker.com is a way of life disguised beneath a URL and a slogan about how technology complicates our lives. Sifting through today’s morsel-sized posts, all delectable for their brevity alone, I discovered that it is possible to steer Google search results away from past internet indiscretions (incriminating photos, decade-old posts to Titanic message boards, etc.) I learned how to disable the startup sound on my MacBook (I don’t need to hear the electronic auditory equivalent of the rising sun dawning on a new day every time I boot up–especially at 3AM when I turn on my computer to watch puppy videos on YouTube because it helps me fall asleep.)

    I even watched a video demonstration about retrieving a cork that has fallen into a bottle of wine, even though that particular hardship has never befallen me. But I’m going to store that little life-byte away for future reference. That is, if I can find a place to put it; I’ve collected so many notes and nodes in the month that I’ve been visiting the ever-updated blog that I’m probably going to need a bigger brain. Therein lies the hidden meaning of the term LifeHacker. Am I taking control and streamlining my life by hacking into it? Or is the philosophy hacking into my life?

    Is there a hack to curb emotional and mental dependence on LifeHacker.com? Would somebody round up a blurb’s worth of info about active logic and independent problem solving? Is there a downloadable, or better yet, a browser-based web gadget that will compare a current problem with the existing contents of my brain and tell me when I need to refer to the LifeHacker.com archives because a solution hasn’t already been processed by my hippocampus?

    I had break a similar dependency on Google when I lived in a flat in New Zealand without internet access or a functional computer. Circumstances forced me to brush up on life skills that the glow of my laptop screen at home had brainwashed out of my mind: reading paper maps without zoom buttons; scanning books and articles without the ‘find’ function; looking up movie listings in the newspaper. Oh, I also taught myself to keep a running list of things to Google the next time I did have access to the internet.

    LifeHacker is a dynamic resource full of solutions for technological problems, productivity issues, and even more personal hang-ups that you may or may not know you had. But browser beware, because the chances that you’ll find a fix for a persistent and pre-existing problem often seem slim. I couldn’t find any information about an Auto-Complete command for one particularly tedious aspect of my job. There didn’t seem to be a new-fangled solution to my exploding closet dilemma. My searches for “bikini” and “flee the country” both returned zero results. I’m going to stick with casual browsing of the blog once or twice a week for now, but refrain from fully adopting the LifeHacker LifeStyle.

    The moment they launch a category called “How To Be Emily,” though? I will hack out a way to tattoo that RSS-feed on my hippocampus.

  • This just can’t be subway love

    Love is in the air. Or maybe there’s something in the water. It’s summer and New York City is getting steamy in more ways that one. I have witnessed more flirtation, heard more pick-up lines and stumbled upon more public displays of affection since this heat wave started than I did all winter, when people were supposed to be cozying up. Is it possible that bedposts across the city are earning new notches for every notch the heat index rises?

    Last weekend, I was on my way into Manhattan, riding the F-train across from three other passengers. One, the A-Rod archetype, had an electronic gadget half-way between a Blackberry and a laptop open on his lap. He wasn’t looking at the screen, though. An exotic-looking (extraordinarily so, I must say) woman had distracted him. When the person sitting between them got off the train, B-Rod slid down the bench seat toward her and wasted no time striking up a little small talk.

    “You’re incredibly beautiful; what’s your heritage?” The woman was blushed graciously and told him that she was Sicilian and Peruvian. She started thumbing through a magazine, but entertained her suitor’s remarks about his own heritage and told him where her parents were from before tilting her head so that her hair draped over her shoulder to form a dark, wavy veil over her face. He tipped forward a bit to get another peek and to offer his phone number, which the woman declined with the coyness that women use when they want to escape without hurting any feelings. She went back to her magazine, B-Rod took it like a man and they just waved and smiled at each other when she got off the train a few stops later.

    As I listened in on countless similar conversations over the next few days, I couldn’t tell for sure if I was actually witnessing an increased amount of would-be romantic encounters or not. It’s entirely possible that the hazy heat is not a product humidity and pollution, but a cloud of pheromones exuded by the over-heating bodies of single New Yorkers. It’s also entirely possible that I’m not inhaling any pheromones at all. In fact, I’m downwind of a garbage can, but so hyper-aware of any state of amorousness at all that the festering Happy Meals and copies of this morning’s AM New York smell like a dozen long-stemmed roses and a melting handful of green M&M’s.

    Perhaps, then, I had spent the whole week priming myself for my own encounter, which took place at Delancey Street late Friday night. A tall, lanky figure emerged from my peripheral vision to take the last remaining seat on the bench and remarked on impatience and late subway trains. We introduced ourselves and eventually got on the train together. When he disembarked forty minutes later, he was technically little more than a stranger; a stranger named “Lavar…like ‘lover’…I can’t believe I just said that.” As I saved his number in my cell phone, I realized that I had been ‘picked up.’ I didn’t even recognize the motives of the advance behind Lavar’s ironic wit and friendly, effortless humor. He had even teased me about the hickey on my neck, garnered at a previous location from a previous gentleman, but I didn’t feel like he interpreted it as a sign (literally) I would be a sure thing.

    My reaction to the pick-up lines and PDsA that people bat back and forth every day is almost always different. Sometimes I’m amused, sometimes I’m impressed, sometimes I’m appalled, and the factors that determine my response are always changing, too. Obviously I’m much more likely to think, “get a room” when I haven’t been in a room of my own for awhile, and when I’m feeling swept off my feet, I’m happy to see someone else get swept. I’m flattered almost as often as I am offended by uninvited and unrequited attention from random guys (and I almost always make a point to interpret cat calls as compliments). No matter what, even in the most sincerely adorable circumstances, I do always find myself wondering: what is it that makes someone interpret a person’s ridership of public transportation as a personal ad?

  • Emily on 8th

    I’m not used to the creaks in these floors yet. The day we got our keys, our landlord turned on all the lights in the living room and he, Caitlin and I stood along one wall and peered down at the glossy wood floors as if we were hoping to see our reflections in a fountain of youth. “This apartment was one of the few where the floors were worth saving,” Jeff said with such open regard for parquet craftsmanship that I silently vowed never to speak foul of the style again. At least not in this neighborhood.

    I knew I was living in the Fairfield County of Brooklyn when I saw, in the gutter, the Monday after Thanksgiving, a squashed, rotting, stuffed tomato. It’s impossible to know just how it landed there, but at least I can be sure that if hooligans are throwing produce out of car windows in this neighborhood, it’s going to be classy produce.

    As classy as the gentleman who said, once he had caught and steadied a lady friend who tripped in the gap where tiles were missing in the subway station stairs, “Honey, you didn’t break your heel did you?” That gap was patched up with cement by the time I got off the train after work and climbed up those stairs to the corner of the street that has started to feel like home. It didn’t sneak up on me. I haven’t been looking over my shoulder for the welcoming committee. Just: off the train at the end of the platform, up to the street, down the block and through the gate, which I can finally open with minimal clanking, up the stoop and through the front door. Up the stairs and down the hall, all “home again, home again, ” keys on the hook, notinyourpocketoronthetableorunderyourpurseorbythetv, and across these creaky floors.

    Maybe they just haven’t gotten used to me yet.