emlocke

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  • Ready or Not, I’m All Wound Up

    He is winding the watch of his wit;
    by and by it will strike.

    – William Shakespeare

    In 2004, I resolved to leave shorter messages in the voice mail boxes of my loved ones. What was meant to be a benevolent effort to stop wasting others’ cell phone minutes backfired before the ball dropped. For the next twelve months, my recordings rambled on, unchanged in length or senselessness, only augmented by this hurried salutation:

    “This message is really long, and you know, I resolved to leave shorter messages this year, so I’m going to hang up now, really, I’m hanging up, really…okay, bye!”

    In 2006, I resolved to listen to the stereo in my car at a lower volume. With the windows closed, I kept the dial at 22 or below. With the windows open, I could pump it up to 26. My success with this resolution depended on the digital volume meter holding me accountable to the neon blue numbers on the display. Maybe if I had someone to hold up a stop-watch every time I left a message on the phone, I would have had a fighting chance with my failed resolution of 2004.

    Maybe it was just silly to resolve to squelch one of my most primal urges. How can I fight the need to ramble?

    Which brings me, through the essential blogging device fondly known as the segue, to my 2007 resolution. How can I fight my primal need to write? I’ve been waiting too long for wit to strike.

    A few months ago, someone told me, “I don’t think I’ll ever be happy unless I’m writing.” It made such certain sense to my head that he could have been reading my mind, but my heart felt pierced, as if it were suffering a slow, persistent loss. I should have started writing something at that precise moment. Instead, I started thinking about writing – the act, the product – and happiness – the state of being, the noun. It complicated what should have been effortless. Writing is a primal aspect of who I am. How can I fight it?

    My New Year’s Resolution for the rapidly approaching 2007 is to start blogging again, and to start writing again. But not right this moment. I have a party to attend. So I’m going to go now, really, I’m going, really…okay, okay, goodbye.

  • No Vacancy

    An hour earlier, when I’d pointed at a rest stop and said “Hey, there’s a rest stop,” my mom told me to hold it.

    Twelve minutes from the hotel, my brother’s girlfriend had to pee. I only grazed my head against the window as the family mini-van lurched into the first fast-food parking lot on our right. We hopped out of the car. Roxy looked like she was ready for a catalog photo shoot. I looked like an unmade bed. Against all better judgement and obsessive compulsions, I yearned for the refuge of the single-stall restroom. I hovered beside the cement door while I waited my turn.

    Through my mom’s open car window, I heard my parents discussing the handful of national landmarks that were visible on the horizon. The capital building, which I’d pointed out only moments ago to insistent hushing, looked two-dimensional against the grey sky.

    “Where’s the Washington Monument?”

    “Right here in my jeans, honey.” An unattractive dirty blonde – the dirty kind of dirty – in a greasy french fry uniform was leaning against the back of the restaurant, where the pair of public bathrooms were concealed from the highway. I rolled my eyes away from him, but not quickly enough to miss the grin he flashed at me, one full of teeth the same color as his hair.

    I don’t understand men. Or they don’t understand me. Or both. What is it going to take for all the skeeves in the world to finally learn: I AM NOT HOT. I’m cute. Like a pet. I’m sweet, when I feel like it. I’m pretty, in one of those unconventional ways, and only when I try. Yes, these jeans are snug. That means there’s only room for one in here.

  • Don’t Sink. Float.

    Once, I was in the throes of a panic attack induced by the crowds and the lines at an end-of-season sale at the Gap and a little too much caffiene and the frustrating fact that I’d spent the night in a huge hotel bed with three guys, none of whom had responded to my moves. As I retreated to the car with my two shopping companions, I tried to breathe evenly and wrangle my anxiety to a controllable level.

    “It’s just anxiety, it’s not going to kill you,” I told myself, hating the stupid set of self-help tapes in which my mother had invested more than that gem of a rehearsal phrase was worth, even as I dutifully repeated it in my head.

    “Okay, at least this can’t get any freaking worse,” was my next attempt to calm myself down. “Well,” I reasoned, silently, “it can’t get any freaking worse, unless some idiot dressed as a cartoon character tries to give me a balloon or something.”

    That put things into perspective. Composing myself for the last two blocks between me and the parking lot, I squared my shoulders and focused my gaze straight ahead.

    Straight ahead, where I saw an enormous foam Sponge Bob Squarepants standing on the corner with a handful of yellow balloons.

    Next thing you know, I’ve collapsed onto the far edge of a bench with my head between my knees. “Sponge Bob Squarepants,” I moaned once, pitifully, as if the porous, angular-pants-wearing personality had just wrung dirty dish water all over me.

    It’s in tragic and ridiculous moments like these, when you are reduced to a quivering heap of frantic, humiliated energy, when you discover the true devotion of your friends. Some of them will laugh at you, under the guise of laughing with you.

    Some of them will flirt their way out of the parking fee and use the last of the cash had between the lot of you to buy you an ice cream cone.

  • What We Walk With

    I caught myself saying something this weekend that I didn’t really mean. I said that, if I could, I would forget everything about New Zealand except for this moment. As if I could wish it all away, which I can’t.  As if I wish I could wish it all away, which I don’t.

    I would not forget the Indian man who owned the one candy shop in Wellington with occasional stocks of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He had the posture of a polite bobble-head doll and he came around to lean against his candy counter every time he saw me come down the front aisle to see if the precious stock had been delivered. I would not forget the way he shrugged his shoulders without taking his hands out of his pockets, or Post-It note that he stuck to the side of his cash register with my name written on it. “Emily W.” he scribbled with a penmanship that made my name look like it might be a Bengali word, right above “peanut butter cups,” which might be the most American phrase ever.

    I would not forget adorable, goofy, gorgeous Andred asking incessantly, “Are you happy?” in his gleeful Kiwi intonation, and I will always remember being so charmed that I could only insist, “Yes!” even if it was a lie and even though there were so many other things I would have rather told him.

    I would not forget filling empty apple juice quarts with tap beer at Pak ‘N’ Save for NZ$3, even though I always ended up at StarMart the next morning to buy a new quart of apple juice to nurse my hangover.

    I would not forget possum flu, because as painful and frightening and revolting as it was, it makes a damn good story.

    I would not forget that Bon Jovi came on the fussy NZ radio just as I took the wheel on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road for the first time.

    I would not forget sitting up in the night to feel the world trembling all around me during my first, and not my last earthquake.

    I probably would forget the torment of the daily walk up to a campus in the world’s most hilly city in a body that was not my own, a body weighed down by a world-class binge of emotional eating, a body that I wanted to crawl out of as I practically crawled up the hill to class in Kelburn.

    But I would not forget the day I dragged that unfamiliar body through sleet and alpine winds, over crags and pinnacles and across eroded plains covered only in clumps of razor-sharp grass. I would not forget crouching in the pitch black bush after thirteen hours on foot, waiting for my own tears to fall, only to have the legs that I couldn’t bear to look down at pick me up and carry me forward, leaving the priss who has been ridiculed and who has ridiculed me on her knees on the side of a mountain in the Tararua Range.

    I would not forget the ill-fated experiment of a chocolate bar filled with kiwifruit-flavored jelly, though I would never bring myself to taste it again.

    I would not forget getting to know my dad in the sounds of a mix CD that he had made for me, but to which I had never bothered to listen. When they play one of those songs at my wedding, I will not remember listening to it as I walked alone along the harbor. I will remember that I could hear my father telling me to be brave, to stick it out, that he believed in me.

    I would not forget planting trees on Mana Island. I will think of them often; I hope that they are growing.

    The truth is, as well all know, as Jim Carey and Kate Winslet showed us on a cold beach in Montauk, memory counts for something. It’s supposed to stick and we’re stuck with it. Like a melted peanut butter cup. Like kiwifruit jelly in your teeth. Like a possum in a water tank. Like your dad’s wise words in your ear. I remember feeling stuck in New Zealand. I also remember what it felt like to escape. I walked away, a little weaker and maybe a little tougher, all for the memories that stuck with me. If only I’d stuck a little closer to Andred.

  • Wine and Manifesto

    On Friday, I decided that I wouldn’t consider myself officially unemployed until Monday.  Practically everyone is unemployed over the weekend.  That was my reasoning.  That’s how I found myself eating dry ramen on the couch at 12:34 on Monday morning while I stare at the cover letters and thank you notes that I started to compose last week.

    But I think I produced my best work during the Summer Publishing Institute’s closing luncheon on Friday.  After three glasses of Chilean chardonnay, I started pulling old receipts out of my wallet and scribbling thoughts down on the back.  When I woke up from my wine-induced nap hours later, I pulled them out of my bag and read my personal manifesto, loosely based on whatever inspiring words our program director was rambling off at the time, for what might as well have been the first time.  It’s pretty moving, or at least, the room seemed to be while I was writing.

    I seem to appreciate myself quite a bit after a little wine.  I must have used the word ‘brave’ at least five times.  I may tend to repeat myself, but my punctuation is on point.  At times, the following is pretty sassy.  On the other hand, it’s certainly not untrue.

    Emily,

    You have made passages that you have chosen on your own.  You have made your own brave choices.  You have made your own brave leaps and you are courageous enough to make more.

    Love, Emily

    1. Transition: you are in a transition during which you will learn, and decide and change.  You are transitioning, but you will always be you.

    2. Change:  You have made changes.  You have made changes that no one else has understood or believed in and you made them anyway because you decided – you chose – what was best for you and you went after it, caught it, and it was brave.  You could have stayed put, but you took action.  You learned to stop settling and start reaching, start demanding, start insisting that you knew – and you do know – what is right for you.  You are a strong, creative and capable woman and you can achieve whatever you choose to chase.

    Look at yourself.  The people you allow to see you love, trust and admire what they see.  It is normal to doubt yourself.  It is healthy to temper that doubt with faith and confidence, because that is what people will see in you – yes, you – when you enter a room, complete a project, or walk out with everyone checking out your adorable ass.

    Why don’t you believe in your own staggering presence…well, I guess I can’t say that I don’t understand that because I am you; I have lived through everything with you that has left you that way.  I hope that now, you – and I – will be able to look at the future and what we mean in the world ahead of us.  We are capable, beautiful, smart, and brave.

    Some years ago, you worked at a dance store where you got the job because your Girl Scout leader owned the place.  But one evening, your mom came to pick you up and while you clocked out, she told the manager who she was and the manager said, “Oh, Emily, of course!  She’s going to take on the world.”  Dance accessories, Emily, you could change the world with dance accessories.

    You can change the world with words or passion or hard work, or with love.  You love hard.

    I’m trying to choose a favorite part.  It’s either the line about my adorable ass or the part where I realize that I’m writing to myself and using first-person plural pronouns.

  • Been on Hiatus

    Hiatus: noun. a pause or gap in series, sequence, or process

    A break can last fifteen minutes, four days or two weeks. It can be a change in the weather or the jump to a new page. It could be an escape or a fortuitous opportunity. Breaks are required by law, taken by choice, made by accident, or stumbled upon.

    There have been a variety of breaks in the last six months of my life. I spent my winter break right back at school as a literary agent intern where I got my “big” break into the publishing industry. My brother and I broke our dad’s Donald Duck mug, and even though he almost never uses it, we hunted down a new one on eBay because it broke our sentimental hearts. I took an unanticipated break from school and spent the whole time wearing broken-in sweats and feeling like I was breaking all the rules. My broken computer hobbled along to the end of the semester, holding out just long enough for Apple to break out the Macbook, on which I am writing today.

    I took a break from blogging. I missed it. I missed the words and the thesaurus and the neat lines of text and two-pixel borders around images. I missed counting up hits and rolling my eyes at the most peculiar referrals.

    It was more of a pause, I’d say, in my capacity to write in any way that could satisfy my standards. I’ve had writer’s block that was less of a boulder or a wall and more of a yawning gap in the road, which could not be crossed for lack of poetic words or thoughts that followed uninterrupted paths of logic. I’d compose one sentence, but before I could finish the second, I’d be dwelling on the first again, tweaking and editing the bliss out of language by sterilizing the process. I felt detached from everything I wrote and that was the most lost that I’ve ever felt. My own thoughts blared inside my head with an indecipherable cacophony, creating a resonating throb, but no poetry or prose.

    At New Year’s, in the fourth grade, I bought a composition notebook and resolved to start a journal in which I wrote down one positive thing about every day. I lasted about six weeks, a stretch either much longer or much shorter than any of my other New Year’s Resolutions have lasted in the years since. A few times, I missed a day and made it back to the notebook, but once a week had passed, it seemed too late, past the point.

    I’m not going to let there be a point beyond which it is too late to return to the blog. I’ll give myself a break, a hiatus here and there, but it’s worth coming back and clicking Compose New Entry when inspiration strikes.

  • On Being a Cowgirl

    There was a time, more than a year ago, when I was living in New Zealand and spending long, lonely afternoons walking up and down the misplaced hills of Wellington with one iPod earbud plugged into one ear, doggedly teaching myself two new lessons about who I was in the world. To protect myself from the silence of a day when I spoke to not one other person, in defense against the 18-hour gap in time between my brother and my parents and my dog, as armor against the humorless absurdity of 4-degree nights in my bedroom, I convinced myself, I subconsciously trained my head and my heart to believe two decisive truths:

    1. I would never fall in love.
    2. I would never make another friend.

    I couldn’t imagine either ever happening again with any marked success and I couldn’t imagine surviving another failed attempt.

    In a strange, backward way of the human subconscious, these dismal beliefs eased my loneliness and heartache. I came to know these things so deeply that I was hardly aware of them, but it was a comfort that, when I felt unloved or unwanted or rejected or abandoned, I didn’t have to feel lost. It was just meant to be that way.

    As the invulnerable cowgirl, loneliness became independence. Longing became indifference. The absence of another made way for a sharper presence of self. I became a girl who chewed on her lower lip not to stave off tears, but to present a fierce autonomy that was both seductive and unattainable. No one could touch me.

    In the months after I returned home and then started my last year at school, I slowly unlearned my defense mechanisms, but I have not forgotten them, my once indelible truths. I double-check my choices against them sometimes. I’m sad that what remains are not the beautiful, sparkling daggers of defiant independence, but a silhouette of the brave cowgirl I once was.

    It seemed that once I was finally aware of the defenses I had built like a turret around myself, the most potent strength that I held up there in a hundred-foot tower drained away and left me only with the bittersweet memory of what it felt like it need no one, to trust no one, to take a dark kind of pleasure in long afternoons spent walking up and down the misplaced hills of Wellington, New Zealand all alone.

    Now, when I need that pleasure, I only have the idea of what it felt like to love only myself and to be loved by only myself. When I reach out to feel for the turrets, my hand passes through the vulnerability of a wall that no longer exists. I walk on vulnerable like it’s a fine line between potential and pain, and I think about the ups and the downs of every hill on every street in Wellington. I’ve unlearned my ‘never’ rules. Now I’m learning again to take the ups with the downs, or the downs with the ups. I’m learning to remember the strength of the dark cowgirl and pair her with someone who became a stranger to me for awhile, who I buried in anger and fear. I am still the open, laughing friend. I am still the candid, innocent girl. The severity of her counterpart has ebbed with time, but she won’t ever vanish for good. I have found them both. They are both parts of this whole.

  • Water Up the Nose


    Originally uploaded by EmLocke12.

    Easter weekend, eight years ago, we brought Maggie Zelda Mae home from the breeder and introduced her to life at the White House.

    That day, we began to introduce some new words and phrases into our vocabulary.
    1. Hurry up!: command. Spoken in a light and excited tone to encourage Maggie to ‘do her business,’ preferably in a speedy fashion. Synonyms: “In the pachysandra!” (My dog is very polite and dainty and likes her privacy in the pachysandra.)
    2. Pedestrian trip: noun. Spoken quietly and ideally without moving lips or even the subtlest gestures toward the dog or her leash. Introduced when the word ‘walk’ became a catalyst for mahem in the house and she also learned to spell the four-letter-word.
    3. Good girl*: endearment. Spoken in the most saccharine croon or the most tender whisper.

    In honor of her anniversary, my mother gave her a full-body baptism. Actually, she got a bath because she showed up at the backdoor with her fur full of deer manure, to put it delicately, and a big grin on her face. (*Note: “Good girl” is not always an appropriate term.)

    The poop roll is something we’ve had to endure more than once over the last eight years, but it’s been worth it for all the other things she has brought into our lives.

  • Worshipping the God on Porcelain

    Yesterday, I walked into a restroom where I make frequent pit stops between classes. There are two stalls, both decorated with torn out magazine pages featuring very outdated celebrity gossip. I usually hit the one on the right because George Clooney appears on the back of the stall door and really, really, truly, I’m never not interested in looking at George Clooney. Even in the bathroom. Is nothing sacred? What can I say? The man is a looker.

    I peeked under the door and saw no feet, but when I pressed on the door, it seemed to be locked. Was it stuck? I pushed a little harder. That’s weird. I started to go for the other stall but I’m just not that into Matthew McConaughey! So I nudged the door again. This time, a tiny little voice said something that sounded like “sorry.” I bent down to look under the door again. No feet. I bent down again. Really, really, truly no feet.

    “Oh, sorry, I couldn’t tell if someone was in there.” No response.

    I went into the other stall and as I tried to avoid looking at Matthew’s picture, I studied the strange shadow being cast on the floor within the next stall. A person-crouched-on-a-toilet-seat-shaped shadow. I didn’t know whether that reminded me of middle school, when I would hide in a carefully plotted and timed series of restrooms to escape science lab, or if it reminded me of a story my aunt tells about a Japanese friend of hers who didn’t know how to use an American toilet the first time she traveled to the States, so she climbed on top of it.

    Not another sound emanated from that stall while I washed and dried my hands and fussed with my hair. I thought about asking if she was okay. Maybe I should have. Or maybe it was better that I didn’t interrupt her ritual worship of George Clooney.

  • Lazy

    We are all imperfect. There are people in our lives who we hope we can count on to be forgiving, accepting, even endeared by our flaws. Sometimes they are the people who want most to believe that we have none, and they are the ones who are caught off guard when we falter.

    And then there are those who want nothing more than to flop over and lie nose to nose with you and say, without words, “No matter what, you’re okay with me.”