emlocke

Category: Lately

  • Getting dressed for work is no longer as easy as flip shorts and I’m okay with that

    It’s gotten warmer out, officially too warm to wear wool, so naturally it was just last week when I decided that all my woolen clothes are my favorites. The olive cashmere t-shirt, the tweed pencil skirt, the fitted black cardigan, the aubergine sweater with the deep vee. Also all my opaque tights, my flannel sheath dress, my ugly, filthy winter boots and the long brown coat that my mom bought for my birthday are obsolete just as I got cozy.

    And now I have to remember all over again how to carry off my summer wardrobe. It’s like having to break in a new skin—every season, whether I’m covering up or stripping down, I resist this transition. I feel like I get dressed in the morning and I’m out of my element, like I don’t know what to do with my hands until I’m back in my perennial pajamas again at the end of the day.

    The summer before my freshman year in college, I was a camp counselor who lived, day in and day out, in four pairs of cotton YMCA-logo “flip shorts,” the kind with the elastic waist that folds over. The boy I dated, where “dated” means “chased after, pushed away, let toy with me, let coddle me, bickered with, and crept around in the woods after dark with” hated those shorts. He nagged me at practically every other meal for dressing the same way every day.

    He made me self-conscious but I kept wearing them. There were days when I’d change out of a different outfit and pull my flip shorts back on just to disprove any suspicion that I might care what he said.

    Sometimes, we would sit cross-legged facing each other and he would pinch at the inside of my knee as he kissed me. Right where my leg folded under, there was just enough skin to grab between two fingers. I don’t know if he was conscious of it. I was. I started wearing jeans when we met up after lights out.

    Sometimes, I approach myself in the mirror over the bathroom sink at work or pass myself by in a pane-glass storefront and I feel like Lucas in Empire Records for a second, with somebody purring that one line from the beginning of the movie in my ear.

    Baby, you are sex.

    It’s my own voice in my own head. And I always listen. I love that voice.

    So I’m saying “goodbye, winter wear!” and happily flaunting the bony ridge on my shoulder that I love* and baring the dessert plate-sized birthmark between my shoulder blades where appropriate, even if I am still covering up my inner-knee pudge.

    * So much so that I just got up to admire it in the mirror before I finished typing that sentence.

  • Imaginando la ciudad fantasma

    The Chaitén volcano in Chile erupted—continues to erupt—this week.

    And once, I was there.

    It’s hard to admit now that, before I fell asleep that night, I rolled over in my sleeping bag and pressed my hands into the soft black sand and thought it was special, a beautiful thing, to walk on a volcanic beach. I wanted that to be my last thought before I slept. I wanted to end the day on that feeling, to epitomize the day with that special thing I got to do, the special place I got to be.

    It’s hard to think about people evacuating their homes in Chaitén and wonder where everyone was on the night I was there. I saw people at the restaurant and a few at the market, but—thousands of evacuees? It’s as though the eruption roused them just to chase them out of the woodwork.

    It’s hard to read about the irreversible devastation, the abrupt loss of flora and fauna, the halt to the agricultural industry, when the volcano seemed to me the gentle face of Mother Earth on that one night. Now I remember, the sand was so brutally black.

    Nothing can stop a natural disaster like a volcanic eruption. No one can anticipate it, though now it seems like it will be impossible not to just wait for the next one, even if it takes another nine thousand years.

    Here is a collection of photos of the violent eruption as the volcano’s contents sparked into a “dirty thunderstorm” taken by United Press International photographer Carlos Gutierrez: Tormenta eléctrica en erupción del volcán Chaitén. The caption translates to, “The startling (moving) beauty of two natural phenomena. An electrical storm (thunderstorm) above the gigantic column of ash that rises from the Chaitén volcano, reaching an altitude of 14 kilometers.”

  • Right now: 64°F / Feels like: 64°F

    This is me right now by the hotel pool.

    I came out with my laptop after a hot bath in my enormous tub to let my hair dry and try to gauge how conspicuous it would be if I were too slip into the water in a black sports bra and panties. It’s pretty quiet down here at this hour, and the other guests don’t look like undercover officers of the Socially Acceptable Swimwear Police. I will continue to pre-meditate this crime of fashion.

    If I look a little smug, it’s because I have never spent a Monday evening this way: with my feet up on a lounge chair, laptop aglow in my lap, the lightest, most floral urban air I’ve ever smelled breezing down the back of my t-shirt. I’m facing the hotel fitness room, which I’m not allowed to use because of my back injury. A workout is a nagging temptation, but for the first time in weeks, I’m content with the alternative.

    (Heaven Sent by Keisha Cole is in that iPod earbud.)

  • What is this, St. Petersburg?

    Upon arriving in Atlanta.

    Another city
    Home to one golden-domed pile
    And ten-plus Starbucks

    There is this one remark that my family has been quoting me on for years every time we drive through Waterbury, Connecticut on I-84. I was a little girl, riding in the back seat, and I think I dozed off and woke up cranky and bored. I saw the Union Station Clock Tower and, mistaking it for Big Ben and then confusing London and Paris, I snarked, “Where are we, Paris, England?” The implication that we had been driving forever, long enough that we could have made it to Europe and back, was lost to my adorable, unworldly slip.

    The Georgia State Capitol building has a golden dome that reminds me of buildings in Hartford, Springfield, Boston, Albany, Chicago, DC . . . I was cranky in the cab from the airport—when the driver said ‘good morning’ I couldn’t believe it was still the morning—but managed not to snark out loud about it this time.

  • In case you’re wondering what’s hidden above the drop ceiling tiles in my office

    Here is a hint at what’s hidden above the drop ceiling tiles in my office.

    There are at least four beautiful skylights above us, but those ugly speckled ceiling tiles keep them out of sight.  This one is partially visible in the stairwell, but it’s been covered with gunk and dust for as long as I’ve been here.

    This week, the building service crew cleaned up the mess, and now you can almost see how pretty this building could be if people didn’t, like, work here.

    Of course they tackled this project the week after Nick Paumgarten’s article on the social and mechanical history of elevators appeared in The New Yorker and the day after the video of Nicholas White’s forty-one hours trapped in Car No. 30 in the McGraw-Hill building was linked on Gothamist.

    While the skylight stairwell was closed for cleaning, everyone on my floor had to use the rickety little single-floor service elevator to get up to or down from “the penthouse.”  In the lobby on the floor below us, we wait for one of the building’s main elevators.  More than once I heard, “I’m just going downstairs to the ladies’ room.  If I’m not back in ten . . . “

  • Until just recently, my dad still kept my eighth-grade photo on his desk

    Today, a little boy named Joshua called me Ma’am.

    I didn’t expect to hear that. For all of my adult life so far, kids, cabbies, customers at the Gap, and lost tourists have all addressed me as ‘Miss.’ In the unfamiliar, it carries a note of affection. Compared to that, ‘ma’am’ sounded so impersonal, disinterested.

    And so I felt compelled to follow Joshua to the conference room where he and nine other kids were building a space station out of leftover cardboard boxes, empty poster tubes and tangled ribbons of clear packing tape. I had something to prove. I am not some faceless she-drone at your dad’s office who provides construction materials without seeing to it that they are put to use with the best of your imagination. Now you look me in the eye and you tell me where you want this fake asteroid missile launcher!

    And then it was time to clean up, so I took off. I have a job to do, after all.

    It’s Take Our Daughters To Work Day—I’m sorry, it’s Take Our Sons and Daughters To Work Day. I was in third grade when The Ms. Foundation for Women created the first incarnation of the career exploration program to promote self-esteem and show little girls what they could do when they grew up.

    It was the early nineties, the movement for equal rights for men and women in the professional world was still trucking, and even as a nine-year-old, I understood that I was going with my dad to his office to see for myself that some day I could, and would, have a job and an office of my own.

    The program was called Take Our Daughters To Work Day for a reason. It was designed for young girls.

    (more…)

  • I woke up on the wrong side of my body

    I’m unaccustomed to sleeping on my back.

    In my dream last night, I was flat on my back inside a brightly lit tube that might have been a tanning bed except that I knew it was an MRI scanner.  Physically paralyzed but comfortably, pleasantly limp, I gazed upward at my reflection in the mirrored metallic cylinder. 

    My eyes were, as things tend to be in dreams, unaffected by the glaring white lights that flashed from above my head and at my feet.  Presumably part of the mechanics of whatever test or screening I was in for.

    I could see myself dressed in a tank top and underwear and I could see, thought the angle wouldn’t have allowed for it in reality, that my toenails were painted.  I had a pronounced tan line across my thighs. 

    I said out loud, “I usually just burn.”  My voice echoed, either reverberating inside the scanner or warbling through layers of subconsciousness.

    I hoped the paleness of my skin wouldn’t be exaggerated when the film was developed.

    I woke up in bed in just that same position with a pillow stuffed under my knees.  My back has been bothering me.  I could probably use an MRI, I decided.  Maybe the dream was premonitory.  Then I looked down at my bare legs and realized I could probably use a little time in a tanning bed, too.

  • And I never learned to cut in a straight line, either

    I’m not any good at sharing. 

    It’s mostly little things: peanut butter M&M’s, the purple beads in the Arts and Crafts bucket, the good pens in the supply cabinet at work.  I hoard little things like that and sometimes I don’t even realize that I’m doing it until I have a pocketful that I hope nobody will notice.  I used to hide an extra fudgesicle up my sleeve after lunch and take the long way back to the cabin so my campers wouldn’t see.  I write my name on cans of Diet Coke in the office fridge—with one of the good pens.

    I’ve been trying to keep it a secret for ten years, since I wouldn’t give Chelsea one of my crackers in the carpool ride to our tennis lesson.  She looked at me sideways across the back seat of Mrs. Doran’s truck and said, “I think you’re a bad sharer.”  There was disbelief in her voice, and defiance, as though she was being forced to taste something she knew she wouldn’t like.

    I didn’t give her a cracker and I didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.  Just forced the rest of my snack down and hid the balled up plastic baggie in one of the pockets inside my gym bag.  Ever since, I’ve been covering.  I share when asked and I try to veil any reluctance, just hope nobody reads it—selfishness—on my face. 

    I think I’m a bad sharer and I don’t know how I got away with it for so long, through grade school without a “U” for “Unsatisfactory” on my progress report card, all the way into adulthood.  And now I wonder if it’s not too late to learn.  I’d have to really want to, at this point, because nobody supervises 24-year-olds to make sure they’re sharing and taking turns.  I don’t think it’s one of the skills assessed in your annual review. 

    I mean, maybe it should be.

    So, I have a six-pack of Diet Coke under my desk right now, and there are five people in my department.  Before I put them in the fridge, I’m going to label one for each of us and for once, I’m going to write somebody else’s name on the extra can. 

    I’m going to try to be a better sharer.  I’m going to try.  What more do you want from me?

    Don’t say a peanut butter M&M.

  • Talk Sundays with Sue

    One of my all-time favorite scenes from Friends is at the beginning of “The One With Rachel’s Sister” when Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Monica and Chandler are assembled in Monica and Chandler’s apartment and they’re surprised when someone knocks on the door. They all react wordlessly with perplexed expressions. Phoebe takes a quick roll, pointing to everyone, including herself, to make sure nobody is missing. Chandler looks a little wary as he answers the door.

    I expected there to be so much more door knocking in my New York life. I expected to perfect the sitcom glance through the peephole and I totally expected to get the chance to answer the door like a character in a drama—peering hopefully through the peephole, hesitating with my hand on the door knob, taking a deep breath before opening the door to reveal . . . the person everyone in the audience expected to be standing out in the darkly lit hallway.

    The front doorbell and buzzer isn’t nearly as good a plot device, I know.

    But it’s how we answer the door in real life. No surprises. I have a stairwell climb to prepare for even unexpected guests and then I beat them to the door, sticking my head out before they make it to the top of the stairs, like I’m impatient. It’s sort of like opening a gift and preparing myself to look thrilled even if I hate it. Like, “Oh! It’s . . . you. Just like on the intercom. Come on in.”

    I always start to feel like this on Sunday evenings, like I’m anticipating something without knowing what. I guess it’s because the weekend is over and I can’t helping wondering, “wait, that’s it? No cliff-hanger? No twist? There’s gotta be a twist. Give me something to get me through the next week!”

    Maybe that’s why they run Talk Sex with Sue Johanson every Sunday night.

  • It repeats, repeats in my ear

    Yesterday afternoon, ordering coffee inside the impressively beautiful Minneapolis Central Library . . .

    When your ears burn, it means somebody is talking about you or thinking about you or something, right? What does it mean when your ears feel like they’re glowing, like they’re being nuzzled from afar?

    Something invisible just tickled my ears like only wine or naked praise can. They burned so hotly I got chills down my spine.

    Does that mean somebody somewhere was thinking some really, really nice thoughts?