emlocke

Category: Photos

  • 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.)

  • Highly Notable Events in April 2008

    I found this note on my keyboard when I got to work this morning. “Happy One Year!” everyone called from their offices where, at oh, 9:15 or so, they were already seated and down to business.

    Visible in this photo of the wall beside my desk is a chart of copy-editing marks and meanings. I have annotated it to include ?!?! which is the unofficial symbol for “needs so much work, I don’t even know where to begin.” Also, while wt in a circle means the wrong font has been used, wtf in a circle means (I think you know what it means). Though neither symbol is officially recognized by any style guide that I know of, they are both universally understood.

    I think the purple Post-it with “sugar, sugar” written on it was a coded reminder to a now expired password. If I needed the reminder, I know I don’t remember it now, and if I can’t figure out what the code is, I doubt you’ll be able to break it. I’ve gone through a great many passwords in the last twelve months.

    The blue Post-it says “Force Refresh CTRL + F5″—the keystrokes clear any data that Internet Explorer has saved and force it to access the ‘freshest’ version of a web page when it’s being lazy.

    Kate Winslet is on the wall because I’m told I have “Kate Days,” when I resemble her, though nobody can pinpoint the like trait. Ariel is there because she is a redhead and a princess—the like traits are implicit.

    Here is my April 2008 list:

    • celebrated one full year with my company, with a job that I keep on loving
    • flirted with a firefighter in uniform
    • received my first wedding invitation from a Mount Holyoke friend
    • took a day off just to go see August: Osage County with my mom
    • a kind neighbor brought my copy of The New Yorker to my apartment after it was misdelivered two and a half blocks away

  • 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 . . . “

  • Better bring in that laundry ‘fore it starts to rain

    There was one teeny-tiny washing machine in the two-family house where I rented a room in New Zealand. The cellar door was on the far side of the house, off the steps that lead down to the backyard. Inside, there was enough room for an old mattress, two broken bicycles, and a petite washer rigged up to a switch that swapped the power source between the two residences.

    Further down, the side steps lead to a weedy backyard. The extent of the landscaping began and ended with two metal laundry trees.

    For most of college, I could manage to stretch my clean clothes as long as between school holidays. I would drive a trunk load of dirty clothing home for fall break and another at Thanksgiving. And if I came up short on undergarments, I thought nothing of a stock-up shopping trip.

    That all changed when I studied abroad. I could only pack about two weeks worth of clothes, and I routinely tramped that limited wardrobe through the muck and unforgiving brush of the New Zealand wilderness. I had to get used to more frequent laundry days.

    And I had to get used to them without a clothes dryer.

    It was June and I was just hanging up what I knew would be my last load of laundry before I went home when the Wellington winds started to blow rain clouds in from the bay. In my rush to retrieve the t-shirts and towels I had just pinned up, wouldn’t you know it, I literally clotheslined myself. I got a “branch” of one of the trees straight across the bridge of my nose.

    It took a long moment for my vision to clear, and then it was already raining. By the time I got my snarled lump of wet laundry up to my room, I had the beginnings of a black eye. I hung everything up, draping clothes over anything strong enough to hold the weight, flinching each time I felt something—surely blood—trickle along the inside of my nose.

    Luckily, there was no blood. Just the shiner.

    (more…)

  • The greatest leap of all is the one you almost didn’t make

    Last Leap Day, I was in Puente Hornopiren in southern Chile, about to launch a sea kayak down the Pacific coast. Hornopiren was the official starting point—notable only because it’s the village that was named in the Outward Bound course catalog, which I read nightly for the month leading up to my trip.

    chile04.jpg

    I remember posing for this picture. I hesitated before I asked German, one of two Chileans among us, to stop with me next to the sign. I didn’t want to be the one to hold up the group on our way out to sea. We were about to leave the landmark behind when a thought occurred to me, one that tickled on a phantom limb throughout my time in Patagonia.

    After barely a moment, I would depart from that spot for good. The signpost would stand there beside the dirt road, beneath rolling clouds of mist on some days and endlessly blue skies on others. The mossy hot springs and the frigid cascadas in the Fiordo Cahuelmó, the keenly lit market in Chaitén, and every crest of pebbled beach somewhere in between would forget my footprints. With time, my memory would weaken and Chile would once more seem too remote to comprehend.

    I wanted a photo that would remind me of that day and of that rare patch of the planet and its very existence. I didn’t want to look over my shoulder just before the next bend in the road and miss what I had already left behind.

    We tramped on toward the harbor. At the very last second, almost impulsively, I stopped short and handed my camera to German.

    While he framed the shot, I bounced on my toes, feeling sheepish. Such a tourist. But I thought, “this is your only chance, and you’ll regret it if you pass it up.” I coach myself with that phrase and I rarely look back to see if it’s true. Of course, I can’t know how much I would have missed this photo if I hadn’t taken that pause; I only know that I’m glad I did.

  • Why couldn’t he have worn the sweater that I picked out for him?

    Can you find the future world leader in this photo from this past Tuesday’s New York Times?

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    Photo by Damon Winter, The New York Times

    Here he is:

    obama_au_circle.jpg

    That’s my little brother Will at Barack Obama’s rally at American University on Tuesday. My dad spotted him in this photo in the first section of the Times. It’s also on the NYT Caucus blog: Obama, Kennedys Resonate with Youth.

    And now I’m the only member of my family who hasn’t made a nearly negligible appearance in the Gray Lady.

    P.S. Will brought his own camera to the big event on his campus (he sort of looks like he’s scoping an angle in the Times photo).  His best shots are of AU a capella group On a Sensual Note, but this is my favorite photo of actual political personalities.

    kennedy-obama.jpg
    Photo by Will White, My Brother

  • Am I crazy or would this kind of be a cute outift?

    I love my new riding boots, but I sort of adore this enormous shopping bag. When am I ever going to land another J. Crew bag this size?

    But it serves absolutely no practical purpose, so I’m documenting it before I put it to better use.

    I’m going to go through my closet for clothes and shoes I don’t wear anymore and use the bag to carry them up to Grand Army Plaza later this month. The Council on the Environment of New York City and the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket will be collecting used clothing, footwear, and household linens on behalf of Goodwill. The program is called Second Chance Saturdays. Textiles can be dropped off at the Greenmarket from 8-4 every Saturday until the end of March.

  • Tinsel, like many conifers, has its own distinctive fragrance

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    If you’re going to have an artificial tree for Christmas this year, at least have one that is absolutely authentic in its artificiality.

  • Regardless, I’d rather ride the subway

    The first time I saw one of NYC’s Garden in Transit cabs, it was about to run me down. I got a good look at the floral decals across the hood and the top of the trunk. I assumed the car belonged to a free spirited driver trying rail against convention, stand out from the rest of the fleet.  But I wondered whether one should be drawing attention while running red lights so boldly.

    The next time, I was riding in the car with my mom; she was driving me back to Brooklyn after a weekend at home. I was scanning the curb for a free parking space when it caught my eye, and it didn’t even occur to me that it might be a doppelganger. “That’s the cab that almost hit me last week! Waaait a minute . . . ” My mom said, “I thought you were looking for a place to park.” I put the stalker-taxi in the back of my mind.

    The next day, Manhattan was covered with neon flowers. I guess that ‘one’ blooming taxi cab wasn’t following me around Brooklyn after all.

    But if this cab were stalking me, that would explain why it was parked right outside my building on Sunday morning.

    The vinyl flower outlines have been completely removed from the hood and the patterns on the back are almost scraped off. It’s too bad that the same can’t be said for the new NYC Taxi logo.

    There’s a video that shows the decal application process on the Portraits of Hope organization website. There is no demonstration of the removal process, though, and according the FAQ‘s, cab drivers who participated in the project are responsible for deflowering their own vehicles.

  • Sudsy math

    And now every time I get in the shower, I have to wonder, “what ever happened to my thirteen percent more?”