emlocke

Category: Lists

  • MHOC Cabin Fall Cleaning

    Painted the walls, scaled the roof, swept the porch, rescued the snow shoes, broke open the shutters, washed the windows, evicted a mouse family, installed some hooks, spruced up the fire pit, cleaned up the garbage, and took some pictures.

  • 49,001 Reasons to Love Coffee

    1. Freezes well.
    2. Represents a global industry; impress your friends and colleagues with your knowledge on international trade.
    3. No matter where you travel, the locals claims the best brew in the world.
    4. Gives your booze a kick.
    5. But you don’t have to feel ashamed when you sit alone at home downing lattes, day or night.
    6. Encourages healthy American spirit (a little commercialism never hurt anybody).
    7. Would you like some coffee with your sugar?
    8. The Fairtrade Foundation.
    9. The delightful twitch that is the caffeine buzz.

    I really was going to hit you with the last 48,992 reasons to love coffee, but my buzz wore off and I am now mentally and verbally inhibited by the one and only reason not to:

    1. The caffeine crash and the subsequent hangover misery.

  • Scenes of Summer

    Young husband or dad, collar unbuttoned, crossing the hazy Stew Leonard’s parking lot to the car; topped-up propane tank in one hand and a hot dog with the works in the other.

    Shade, warbled on the pavement as sunlight filters through leaves. Shelter beside the farm stand down the street. Corn on the cob. Tomatos, small but homegrown.

    Pomegranate and persimmon sky over the backyard. Hold up an empty collins glass, frame the sun and you could be toasting a tequila sunrise.

  • sanity management

    i haven’t even thought about packing for school yet. most of my college-specific stuff is still in crates and my trunk in the basement where it lived all spring, but i need to at least make a list of must-have clothing, beauty appliances and lifestyle accessories that i don’t want to forget. and it had better be a short list, since i’m challenging myself to pack light.

    when i get to mount holyoke, i’m going to have so many forms to complete and have signed. i need transfer of credit approval and advisor registration and i haven’t even declared my major yet. in the meantime, i am making a list of sanity management tasks to do before i leave.

    e-mail professors about book lists
    e-mail dweber about advising
    call res life about one card and where to pick up room keys
    call parking office
    complete out-of-state lisence forms in quadruplicate
    online parking registration
    buy planner (pink?) (blue?) (black)
    submit absentee ballot request form
    e-mail registrar about AP credits
    e-mail arcadia university rep about study abroad
    apply for jobs at the SAW center

    crossing things off this list means i won’t wake up every morning trying to remember what i reminded myself not to forget to do right before i fell asleep!

    quote of the day: “hey, man i’m alive, i’m taking each day and night at a time…but someday i’ll be saturday night” – bon jovi

  • i was the nineties

    if you’ve watched vh1 at all recently (even just flipped through during a commercial break) you know that a new decade has been condensed, documented and exalted (perhaps, in some cases, humiliated as well) for the entertainment archives. like, for sure, i love the 90’s premieres july 12th.

    since i was born in 1984, i pay homage to saved by the bell and my little ponies, but i consider myself a child of the 90’s pop culture. my awareness of current music didn’t spark until the fourth grade when i voted for pearl jam in the class poll b/c i thought their name sounded the bandiest or something. 1994 was also the year we saw the sign and when, before everything was ‘sweet,’ it was ‘dude.’ pogs and the minibackpack followed in 1995.

    other trends that i remember fondly:
    – slap bracelets and their subsequent ban
    – neon rainbow academic paraphenalia (remember the trapper keeper?) by lisa frank
    – jellies sandals, their distinctive fragrance and the prints they left in the sand
    – pogs on the blacktop at recess
    – beanie baby collections
    – over-alls and radically mismatched clothing
    – later on, the reincarnation of bell-bottoms as flares
    – aol chatrooms and saving ‘convos‘ for posterity (or blackmail)
    – electronic pets on keychains (nostalgic? buy an autographed one on eBay.)
    – the nokia 5000 series and all those x-press on covers
    – a different shade of nail polish on every single finger

    i wonder what we’ll be remembering in ten years (and what vh1 will title that series, since no one can figure out what to call this decade.) reality tv, camera/video cell phones, the friends finale, flip shorts and the atkin’s diet. blogging, perhaps?

    quote of the day: “all right, stop, collaborate and listen” – vanilla ice

  • class act

    today was the deadline for online preregistration for students on leave (that’s me!).  without really thinking about it, i registered for twenty credits.  that doesn’t actually have even semi-set-in-stone implications on my academic schedule in the fall since it’s only pre-registration and there is always lots of class shopping left do once all the fiesty, indecisive ladies return to the halls of mhc, but i think the five course road is a good one to travel.  i need two extra credits anyway, to make up for my semester off, and i’d rather get them out of the way now and bypass any future classyear/promotion confusion later on.  i’m a little hesitant to overdo it my first semester back, but i don’t want to be worried about a couple of forsaken credits as a senior.
     
    so my courses are:

    english 265 literature for children
    (writing-intensive course) this is a survey course. we will explore contemporary american children’s literature from three perspectives: how children’s books stack up as literature, how they speak to issues in children’s development, and how they reflect and shape social issues and values.
     
    english 311 chaucer’s stories and storytellers
    this course provides a close reading of the greater part of the canterbury tales, with collateral study of their intellectual, social, and historical context. the goal of the course is to understand the complex interplay among poetic form, social criticism, humor, sexuality, and spirituality that characterizes the stories.
     
    latin american studies 180 introduction to latin american cultures
    examines the confrontation, assimilation, and transformation of amerindian, african, and european cultures in latin america from the sixteenth century to the present. focuses on the processes in which distinctive self-images emerged in the region and how these images have been challenged and changed over time. uses films, literature, and folk traditions to complement scholarly analyses of the emergence of a new world mentality.
     
    religion 230 spirituals and the blues
    (speaking and writing-intensive course) this course examines and analyzes african american music as a primary textual source for understanding philosophical and religious language within that community. it addresses various questions: what are the central philosophical and religious themes expressed within the text? how are these themes reflected in the music? what is the intrinsic character of the spirituals and the blues? is there such a thing as a “music of oppression?” in what way(s) does the black experience contribute to philosophical and religious understanding, as well as the use of language? what does this material suggest about the connections among art, literature, and experience?
     
    philosophy 205 ethics
    is morality relative to individual preferences? would you rather be free or happy? are friends necessary for a good life? would you rather be a satisfied pig or a dissatisfied student? these questions illustrate some of the issues that will be raised by the ancient and modern ethical philosophers we shall explore in this course, looking at sources as varied as novels, canonical philosophic texts, and even children’s stories.
     
    the lit courses obviously fulfill requirements for my major.  the latam course satisies the multicultural requirement.  i chose the others somewhat randomly based on the professors, topics, and of course the meeting times.  spirituals and the blues is ideal for this semester b/c it meets for two hours only once a week so it won’t conflict with anything else even with the five class hours to navigate.  and i can take it, or the ethics course pass/fail and not have to worry about it too much, but still get the extra credits.  if i change anything, i’d switch into an education class or a physical science to meet the (blah) distribution requirement.
     
    i like picking courses b/c it’s like the beginning of the semester when all my notebooks are clean, my pencils are sharp, everything is organized and the air smells like the first day of school.  i’m always so motivated during the first few weeks of fall classes.  i wish i could go back to campus for that part and have another vacation, b/c i think i’m going to need it!
     
    quote of the day: “it was one of those perfect english autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” p.d. james

  • the great boy list

    i’ve decided to resurrect the legendary, the coveted, “the boy list.” the list originated in the summer of 1999 when i was an lit at camp jewell, back in the day when lit’s lived in the boathouse. that’s right kids, “livin’ in the boathouse, let’s begin.” we had this huge notepad in the common room and i started a list of all the qualities i hoped to find in a potential boyfriend (at the time i was still looking forward to my first boyfriend…and my first kiss, actually) and hung it up above the fireplace. i wanted the other girls to add to the list and maybe even for the boys to start their own. but i think people just thought i was weird. or, other things i had said or done had already lead them to believe that i was weird, and this just proved their hypothesis. either way, nobody ever added to the list, so at the end of the session i took it home, diagrams and all, and hung it on the back of my closet door, where i forgot about it for years.

    that was really just a first draft and i don’t even know if i have it anymore. but recent experiences have inspired me to write down certain things i love and have loved about boys so i will always remember what details to look for next time. sure, there are plenty of things i could remind myself to avoid, but this is all about optimism.

    the list isn’t about mandatory prerequisites or a screening process. if a guy doesn’t meet one or ten or twenty-seven of the items he probably still has a pretty good chance with me. and i know every individual guy has his own qualities to offer, whether or not he intentionally designs and rehearses them in advance. probably a lot of qualities that could end up on the list eventually.

    now, i’m not going to publish the list, b/c obviously this is a blog, not a personal ad. let’s not go wild with the desperation here. but certain people might be able to gain password protected access to certain sections of the list, or maybe even the whole thing. e-mail me with subscription applications!

    quote of the day: “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” – edgar allan poe

    love always, em locke