emlocke

Category: Lately

  • Obeying weather patterns

    Sometimes it snows in March

    Last week, I was tromping around in the snow on the roof of my office building.  It was so windy that my pupils couldn’t focus properly, like I had a layer of slush coating my eyes instead of tears.  My hands were slow and stiff in the cold, but I managed to take the token self-portrait above.  For posterity.  Because I hadn’t expected to hear the voluminous hush of snow again in Winter 2009, and then I got this one last chance.  And you never know where I’ll be for Winter 2010.

    Over the weekend, positively balmy temperatures drained away every remnant of that last chance snow storm.  I went out in a cotton tank and a light wool cardigan.  Wearing sporty silver flats.  My bare ankles were exposed and they were like, “hello world!”  We opened all the windows on Saturday morning and when I got home early, early Sunday morning, the smell of warm, damp bricks still swished around the perimeter of the apartment.

    One year, my high school closed for a day in the middle of May because all the school buses had been vandalized.  Usually it takes a snow storm to cancel school, but they couldn’t transport students in buses with blacked out windows.  The weather was warming up, but that day, the air just happened to be saturated with the scents of sun and grass.  It was so, so hard to go back to school the next day, having had that taste of summer, and knowing that our long vacation was so close.

    Now that there’s no real summer vacation to anticipate, the weather taunts me with just the coming of a different season.  Me and my ankles.

  • Fluff feather pillows daily

    What does it mean when you repeatedly dream about marriage and bed linens?

    “You were talking in your sleep.”

    “Was I? Oh no. What did I say?”

    “You said, ‘if we get married, will you fluff my pillow every night?’”

    “Huh.”

    “My answer is no.  Just so we’re clear.”

    “Oh, we’re clear.”

  • The February Shoe

    Do other people do this?

    When I’m picking out a new calendar, the picture on the page for my birthday month is a big factor.  I like when the whole year’s worth of images is printed on the back cover so I can see what I’m getting in to.

    It’s silly, I guess, because February is the shortest month of the year.  If my favorite picture is on the February page, I only get to look at it for twenty-eight days.

    Two years in a row, I’ve had the same calendar in my office: The Metropolitan Museum: Shoes.  And two years in a row, a pretty purple 1930s-era pump has been the shoe of February.

    Oh, right, so my birthday is tomorrow.

    I put clean sheets on my bed and fluffed all my pillows.  I’ve got my favorite t-shirt and my Dunkin’ Donuts card laid out for the morning.  There are Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (!) in my lunch bag.  My desk at work is all cleared off (there were a couple of things I just did not want to deal with on my birthday, and I put them in the bottom drawer for Wednesday morning).  Caitlin and I are getting our nails done after work.  Marie and I are going out later this week.

    I want to spend my birthday on these little things, these inconsequential things that make me feel special.

    When I turned twenty, I hadn’t shaved my legs for a week because I was having them waxed before my trip to Chile.  I spent this perfect, quiet morning at home in my bathrobe, I had lunch with my grandmom, I went to work and did math homework and ate cake with my sweet boys.  If I could have changed about that day, I would have shaved my legs.  That’s it!

    I don’t need a perfect day.  I just want the nicest possible totally normal day.

    And a new mattress.  I want a new mattress.  Which my parents are getting for me because I’m turning twenty-five, and old ladies need back support as much as they need beauty rest.

  • Observed today while waiting for traffic lights to change

    A Jeep with my dad’s initials in the license plate

    A cat crouching under the Jeep

    A child with a bagel around his pointer finger like a ring

    A cab driver pouring a cup of coffee out the window

    The “not going out of business/losing our lease/becoming a Chase Bank or a Duane Reade” signs in the windows at Fish’s Eddy

    Soggy papers in a leaking AMNY box

    A girl sprinting to beat the light (she didn’t make it)

  • Every winter I have to remind my parents that the heaters in my room don’t work

    I dreamed the other night that I wrote an entry about all the things I wear to stay warm through the long, cold nights in my house.  It was like a recipe for A Warm, Happy Emily.  It went a little something like this:

    Materials

    1. Spandex fitness top.  A seamless style without metal strap adjusters preferred (those teeny tiny things conduct a mean cold pinch!)
    2. Long-sleeved silk thermal top with four-year-old hot chocolate dribble stain down the front.  Thumb-holes allow a bonus inch-and-a-half of wrist coverage.
    3. Raspberry purple raglan-sleeved wool sweater.
    4. Dark gray cotton/Lycra blend leggings.  (May have been black leggings in a former life).
    5. Sweatpants.
    6. One pair of wool socks, extra itchy.

    Instructions

    To achieve a warm, happy Emily, layer her in the above articles and tuck her in to bed beneath one sheet; one cotton blanket; one wooly blanket (affectionately known as “The Sully Blanket” for its resemblence to the poncho that Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman‘s Sully donned on several occasions during Season One); and one down-filled comforter.  Tuck edges in under her like a burrito.

    Sleep eight to nine hours without disturbance.

    Upon waking, wrap in down vest.  Remove itchy socks and replace them with down bootie slippers.  Serve hot coffee with skim milk and three Splenda.

  • You don’t have to go to the talkies to get your Fitzgerald fix this Christmas

    I’m going to start planning for Christmas 2009 tomorrow.  Instead of spending all fall thinking about getting ready for the holiday only to wake up on the 21st and wonder where all the time has gone, I’m going to flip ahead in my 2009 calendar to September of next year and write ‘to do’ items in as reminders so I can spread the preparation out over three and a half months.

    Christmas is a misleading holiday because it doesn’t happen at the very end of the month, but I think a lot of people think of it coming then.  You don’t have all of December to shop and bake and wrap and decorate.  In fact, you don’t even have 25 days because Christmas begins on Christmas Eve, the 24th, and the world as we know it seems to stop in time around four o’clock that afternoon.  I always feel cheated out of the last few daylight hours on Christmas Eve because it’s always then that I remember something that occurred to me on Halloween but has evaded my memory since then.

    And speaking of Halloween!  Next year, I promise not to scoff when red and green holiday decor goes up at Target and Pottery Barn before the black and orange stuff comes down.  We all complain that it’s too soon, that retailers are pushing the holidays upon us to pull our dollars out from under us.  We say, “Already?  But Christmas is months away!”  And then we go about our merry ways as though we have outsmarted the advertising industry and the Gregorian calendar (not to mention Baby Jesus).  It’s not months away!  It’s one month and twenty-four days away.  Most people probably need all that time between Halloween and December 24th to get ready.

    The one thing I wanted to do in advance that I actually did in advance was to find another Christmas-y short story to share here like I did last year.

    And so, I give you A Luckless Santa Claus by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1912 when the author was about sixteen.

    Oh, F. Scott.  I love you for hyphenating the word “pro-ceeding.”

    Merry Christmas to F. Scott, Zelda, Dorothy and Harry, and merry Christmas to you.

  • What kind of cereal has a “Things to Do Before You’re 25” list on the box?

    I have to work on Tuesday before I go home for my actual Christmas vacation, but I used the last of my personal days to have myself a merry little staycation of a long weekend.  A vacation calls for “Vacation Cereal,” you know, the kind of breakfast you’re only allowed to eat on special occasions because they aren’t considered ‘brain food.’

    I sat down this morning to eat my bowl of Reese’s Puffs and ‘read’ the back of the box.  Remember the days when a breakfast’s worth of word searches and mazes and riddles were provided on the back of the breakfast packaging?

    When I saw the back of this particular box, I thought, Isn’t this ironic?  Yeah, I really do think.

    At 18, I would have checked off five or six things.  I scored the school newspaper equivalent of the winning goal my senior year in high school.  I’d kept more than one pointless collection and raised money for more than one charity at that age.  I got away with a stellar practical joke at 19 (retaliation is the worst).  At 20, I swung across a canyon, which close enough to bungee jumping to count, I think, and probably as close as I want to come.

    I’ve idolized a handful of people, including authors and actors both living and dead, and I’ve met a couple of them.  I’ve made discoveries, literally and metaphorically, though to my knowledge, nothing has been named after me.

    A couple of these items don’t make much sense, though.  For one thing, I’ve met plenty of other Emily‘s.  I think there were two others in my pre-school class.  I’ve never met someone who shares my full name and I’ll be just fine if I never do.  That’s more like a bizarre coincidence than a life goal.  Another quandry: 18-year-olds haven’t been licensed drivers for even two years.  In some states, they aren’t even allowed to drive across state lines after dark before they turn 18.  Just when are you supposed to take a road trip from coast to coast?

  • My mother told me I sounded high. Maybe I am high!

    According to the AccuWeather Widget, the current conditions in Brooklyn are: Winds from NE at 13 mph; Scattered showers of bouncing pearls.

    Splendid!

    I wanted to hug today; the day itself.  I had the day off from work, but I was in Manhattan early enough to see the snow really start to come down in Rockefeller Center.  I haven’t been anywhere near Rockefeller Center in months.  I don’t think I ever laid eyes on last year’s tree.  And though I’m never looking for an opportunity to rub elbows with tourists in ski jackets, there was an infectious strain of excitement in the air there.

    I blinked flakes from my eye lashes.  I said ‘good morning’ to the guy rolling out the snow mats at the entrance to J.Crew.  I got a smile from a tiny kid trying on ginormous earmuffs.

    I also got 20% off my purchase.

    I like The First Snow.  What’s not to like?

  • Britney hasn’t done a Christmas album so I’m mixing up the tunes

    Last night I sat on the train next to a guy studying the pages of what must be the “textbook” for a taxi driving school.  It was a bound book of pages and pages of hotel, hospital, and museum addresses and mnemonics for figuring out where a particular street address falls between avenues.

    Here I am, thinking I’m such a genius with the “traffic travels east on the even-numbered streets and west on the odd-numbered streets in Manhattan” rule (with seven exceptions, I think).  And I’m all impressed with myself when I inform my father that Penn Station and Grand Central are not, in fact, directly across the island from one another.  Haughty amateur!

    I scored 66% on this Hack License NYC Taxi Test, and only because most of the questions concerned the geography of city parks.

    This is what I’ve been listening to at my desk and not in my cab this week:
    Circus by Britney Spears
    Circus by Britney Spears
    Circus by Britney Spears
    O Little Town of Bethlehem by Sarah McLachlan
    Oh, Holy Night by Tracy Chapman

  • Highly Notable Events in November 2008

    • Traveled to the land of my birth
    • Celebrated Election Night with my mom, my dad, and The New York Times
    • Went to the mall on Black Friday
    • Met a friend from the internet in real life
    • Became an Ugg-wearer

    I scheduled the last of my vacation days for 2008 today.  Yes, today.  On the first day of the last month of the year.

    There are thirty-one days in December.  Eight of those days are weekends.  Five of them are company holidays.  Major seasonal meetings take up most of four of them.  Our department bonding activity is scheduled on another day.  That left twelve days eligible for the Vacation Day stamp.  Oh, and I was already in the office by the time I tried to sort this all out, so forget about December 1.

    I have to take five of those eleven days off.  Am I going to get any actual work done before the end of the year?