emlocke

Category: Lately

  • This was me last night

    Written around 9:52 on Wednesday night in a hotel suite in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota . . .

    Here I am, in a hotel suite in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have no idea what states border this one, I have no idea how to work the coffee maker in my room, and I have no idea what to do with myself.

    I got thrown out of Barnes and Noble at 9:00. A single-digit closing time? What a bust. So I headed back to my room to play this fun game where I browse all the random names that people choose for their wireless networks and click repeatedly on every single one and then click “Cancel” when I get the prompt for a password that I don’t know. I’m not certain what the object of this game is, but I know that it’s not just to connect to the internet, as one might assume.  It’s more complex than that.  I could play this game all night.

    And I would have, until finally, my battery died and I couldn’t rationalize unpacking the power cord just to prolong my own grievous misery.

    I opened a beer and spent the rest of the evening eating cheese and crackers and watching March Madness games. Okay, I checked on the scores, but what I really watched was Field of Dreams.

    Field of Dreams takes place in Iowa. Does Iowa border Minnesota?

  • Points if you can name the song with the best third line

    The American Book Review published their listof the 100 best last lines of novels in their January/February issue.  I like the sound of “Best Last” next to each other in the headline.  It reminds me of the end of the school year when we would count down to summer vacation starting with the “First Last.”  It was that point in our repetitive weekly routine after which everything else would wind down.

    It’s unclear just what exactly constitutes a last line, according to The American Book Review.  Some of the selections are much more than a line, even more than just one sentence.  Some seem completely garbled out of context and some neatly bundle up the whole book that preceded them.  I’m not sure a last line is greater ifit is meaningful beyond the last page of its book or if it is not.  

    Here are the lines I like best:

    “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

    And you say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.”—Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

    This is the difference between this and that.—Gertrude Stein, A Novel of Thank You (1958)

    She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.—Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)

    As an aside, the song is Laid by James.

  • That’s not a complete sentence, but Thanks.

    “You’re a really great writer.”

    “It was just a two-sentence memo.”

    “I know.  Just saying.”

  • In which I perform a self-check-out

    I was elated when I discovered four self-checkout registers installed at the Key Food in my neighborhood.  They meant no more cringing as a bored kid in an apron bagged heavy produce on top of fragile tortilla chips.  I wouldn’t have to resist rolling my eyes as I insisted that I didn’t need a plastic shopping bag.  I wouldn’t even have to imagine curious expressions from the teen who put down her Sidekick just long enough to ring up my every growing weekly ration of flavored, carbonated bottled water.  I wouldn’t feel obligated to fake contrition when I showed up in sneakers and gym clothes—still sweating—to pick up a pint of mint-chocolate chip ice cream at 11:30 on a Thursday night.

    I wouldn’t even have to remove my iPod headphone.

    I am slightly chagrined to admit how much this all says about me.  How I would love to have my human essence captured elsewhere, in a light more flattering than the supermarket fluorescence.  In one of Shelley’s poems.  In the dress I wore to my Junior Prom, a dark green ballgown with pockets.  In the rope swing by the lake at Camp Jewell.  Even in another machine, perhaps in a centrifuge or in an all-in-one printer. 

    But I’ve got the self-check-out machine, and I’ll take it, and I’ll laugh-groan and write about it.  It’s funny because it’s true. 

    The self-checkout machine gives away so much about who and how I am.  How I can be irrationally patient.  About the way I itch to have control and the way I’m often wary, on guard until I’m certain I don’t need to be.  About my haughty environmentalism.  That I can be autonomous to the point of isolation.  That I’m proud, but that I’m weak.  How I am disciplined and how I indulge.

    And, unexpectedly, just how chatty I can be, how I can’t resist the impulse to strike up a conversation.  Because as grateful as I am for the solitude provided in the self-checkout aisle, I never fail to make small talk with someone when I’m there, even if I never turn off my iPod.  While I’m bagging my own bottled water in my own shopping bag.

  • This is too “Wheels on the Bus” for me

    The new thing on my block is the school bus that pulls up to a building across the street and down a bit from mine every morning at 8:04. The driver honks five times; shave and a haircut. There’s another attempt at 8:05. One morning I heard the ditty thrice and on that day, last week, I looked out the window in time to see a kid come outside holding—honest to goodness—a red apple. He gets a hand up into the bus and his mom waves from the stoop.

    Where I come from, we couldn’t see the bus stop from our house. We waited outside, rain or shine or snow, trying to guess which would show up first: the bus or the sun? If we weren’t at the bus stop when the bus came around the bend, it wouldn’t even come to a complete stop. We were lucky to get all of our limbs clear before the door shut!

    These Park Slope kids have it easy.

    I don’t need to have flashbacks of road races after The Big Yellow when I’m running late for work.

  • Tilt your head this way ’cause I’m deaf in one ear

    When our friend Amy invites Caitlin and me out one Saturday night, she describes our destination as “Meatpacking.” Just like that. A proper noun all by itself. As though it’s the local supermarket or a small coastal town.

    “She’s on a first-name basis with The District.”

    “We’re going to need something more specific.”

    Caitlin sends her a text message: ok! where? Amy texts her back with an address and approximate time. We’re already getting dressed and then we find ourselves with some time to kill.

    I agree to trim Caitlin’s hair on the condition that we do it before we start drinking, which is not how she proposed the project. We open the bottle of wine that I’ve had in the fridge since before Thanksgiving. Saving it for something, for nothing. For when I felt like it. I definitely feel like it as we sit together on the futon, watching Arrested Development on DVD and making up rules to our own drinking game as we go along.

    Once, in college, a friend of a friend of a friend set me up with one of his friends on the basis that, “He’s kind of shy. You’re kind of shy. It’s perfect.” In the car on the way home, just the girls, we agreed emphatically that the logic was faulty, but this particular guy was a lost cause. “He turned and faced the brick wall every time I tried to include him in the conversation.” “Is that seriously the type of guy people see me with? Seriously?”

    After we turned out the lights, though, I relived the encounter and reconsidered the set-up. Across the blue-black room, I asked my roommate if she thought the fact that I’m deaf in one ear could possibly be an issue for guys. Not that it would be a turn off, but that it could make certain people nervous in certain situations.

    “No.” She paused and I waited. “I mean, I really don’t think so.”

    I was right though; it does make certain people nervous. It makes me nervous. Turns out, the fact that I’m deaf in one ear is mostly just an issue for me.

    (more…)

  • What is Tim Gunn’s job description?

    I can’t figure out what greater purpose Tim Gunn serves on Project Runway. He’s sort of the proctor in that he’s the one to administer challenges and lay down the rules. He’s sort of the team coach, with his pep talks. He’s sort of the voice of reason, with his arched eyebrow.

    He’s sort of an advocate for the designers because he’s not a judge, and that’s why his visits and his speculative remarks are more or less welcomed and why he’s the one to bid the final farewell to the outed contestants. But sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t walk out of the workshop, light up a cigar, and take bets in a Project Runway elimination pool.

    I will revisit the Tim Gunn Is a Bookie conjecture next season.

  • And here you have it, the extent of my classical music expertise

    When the vestibule door to my apartment building closes from a certain point without impediment, it creaks three notes from the second movement of Vivaldi’s Winter (L’inverno) concerto.

  • On assimilation, in a way

    The very first piece of mail that I received when I moved to Brooklyn in 2006 was my Brooklyn Public Library card.

    I had pre-registered online, so the card came with instructions about using it for the first time—something about a postmarked envelope and a photo ID. I don’t remember exactly what the instructions were because I’ve never followed them. For fifteen months, I’ve lived fifteen minutes from two different branches of the Brooklyn Library, and I haven’t spent even fifteen minutes within the thresholds of either one.

    For some reason, the library straddles the line between places to go while I live in New York and places to go because I live in New York. It doesn’t bear the appeal of a destination spot, but it hasn’t become an errand that I run.

    It’s not like I’m suffering any great shortage of books on my nightstand, but I associate an incomparable kind of comfort with libraries, one that depends on much more than a lengthy reading list. It feels a little excessive, a little indulgent, to be surrounded by so many books without being obliged to every one. There is a peaceful anonymity to just standing among the books that are and aren’t mine, maybe squinting one eye to let all the titles blur in the deliberate noiselessness.

    I have the Brooklyn Library card on my key ring and on any day, I could drop in and activate it. I could look around, smell the books, maybe go a little cross-eyed. I’d let myself be spoiled by literary benevolence. I would, I think, get another point for assimilation. But I think I’m reluctant to feel that comfort at any library but the one I’ve always known.

  • Something else about my recent birthday or illness

    There are two stores on the street near my office with Going Out of Business, Everything Must Go! signs in their windows, which means two empty storefronts within the week, which means two new retail ventures will be swooping down in their places.

    This is akin to the high hopes I used to have whenever a new neighbor moved in. A SOLD sign would go up outside and I would start wondering if the incoming family would have a kid my age and if it would be a girl and if she would sit with me on the school bus and if she would like to play pretend village in the woods (I did) and if she would own Mall Madness (I didn’t) and if we would be Best Friends Forever.

    For now, I’m trying to be inconspicuous while I play out in the front yard and peer across the street, looking for a new friend. I hope it works out. Because Kate Spade just moved in a few blocks away and though I’ve been over to play dress-up, the new girl hasn’t invited me to a slumber party yet.