emlocke

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  • Classes Are Over

    I just had the most surreal moment. My cell phone rang and woke me up. I was at my desk, but I didn’t realize that I’d been sleeping, sprawled down over my notebooks, one arm flopped over my keyboard and one dangling at my side. I have no idea when I passed out.

    I had been waiting for a professor from last fall, Anna, to call about writing a recommendation for me. My caller ID was flashing Anna, so I tried to pull myself together, sound not-so-much like the semi-concious student. I answered and was surprised to hear my old professor inviting me to a party. Then it clicked that I definitely didn’t have her number in my cell. My friend Anna was on the phone, inviting me to a pre-finals party.

    When I hung up, I rubbed my eyes and tried to figure out how long I had been sleeping. I remembered working on my Brit Lit final, but I couldn’t remember my last sentence. The TV was on behind me; What Not to Wear was over and a documentary about narcolepsy had come on.

  • Seething Stillness

    My neighbor plays music so loudly, I can hear the chord changes. On Friday, I knocked on her door, pleading for peace. After twenty minutes and four drum solos on her door, I was fuming. She couldn’t hear me over the disco revival going on within. I wailed on the door with the curl of my fist and she finally emerged.

    Now, it is silent. But the quiet is unnatural and patronizing.

  • I’m Too Busy Checking Myself Out

    One of the things you have to brace yourself for if you’re going to be actively losing weight at an all-women’s college is that people will assume that you are obsessed with it, you have set your eyes on the prize and the prize is having ‘thin’ become the sole basis of your identity and, worst of all, you’ve been motivated into your delusional health and fitness mania by, wait for it, images of women in the media. Not even the Dove billboards could break you from your diet-induced trance because every publicized female figure from the anonymous chick on the cover of your first issue of Seventeen to the girl with the perky pout in the newest Clean and Clear commercial has skewed your perception of the feminine form. Every time you weigh yourself you are propogating the exploitation of slender women in the media. You’ve been brainwashed.

    I would like to offer some evidence to the point that I am not tacking magazine clippings of ladies up around my mirror and flipping through commercials just to rate the spokesmodels on waifishness.

    In elementary school, usually once in the fall and again in the spring, my class took a field trip out into a swamp or down to the Norwalk River or across the street to a farm – anything to expose us to the outdoors for a period at least a little longer than the walk to and from the bus stop. The standard dress-code for these events involved light layers, a wind-breaker tied unflatteringly around the waist, a cap with a flat-brim (if you were me and never wore athletic attire unless it was strapped onto my body by my mother) and tube socks – oh, the humanity – rolled up over the cuffs of our pants. I loathed this fashion injustice so fiercely that I would resist until the moment before we disembarked the bus at our destination and almost broke my own ankles yanking my socks down when we boarded the bus again at the end of the day.

    If I’d been so susceptible to the images of other girls around me, or images in the media, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much to tuck the cuffs of my jeans into my socks. You know, some people could have pulled a fashion statement out of this look. Not me. I knew my pants looked ridiculous. I knew my socks looked ridiculous. I knew I looked ridiculous in my ridiculous pants and my ridiculous socks. Regardless of how ridiculous every other scrunchie-wearing girl in my class looked right alongside me, I was too busy pouting about my own apparel misfortune to notice.

    Something else you have to brace yourself for at an all-women’s college is that people are generally critical when you show signs of self-absorbtion.

  • People Watching

    On Anzac Day, I woke up in a wet sleeping bag in a wet tent, put on my wet hiking boots and hitched out of the local forest park and back into town to catch the train home to Wellington, where there would be just as much rain but far less mud.

    The train ran all day and I wanted to stretch my weekend out as long I could, so I spent most of the day meandering through Upper Hutt, a spot of concrete on the southern plain known for not being known for much of anything. For an hour or so, I sat in a cafe with chalkboards on every wall, The Best American Short Stories of 2005 open beside the mocha on my table, watching the Huttites dwell around me in their natural habitat.

    A man and a woman ordered dessert and each one was served a different kind of cake. The waitress departed their table and immediately the man sloppily scooped away the pointy end of his crumbling slice and scraped it on to his companion’s plate. She split her own piece in half the long way and held a dainty bite up to his lips. While he chewed, she neatly slid one half of her cake off of her plate and on to his. They exchanged flavors, one dark and smooth and one white and fluffy, without so much as a pause in their conversation about a movie or the weather or the holiday weekend or whatever (I’m not an eavesdropper, just a people watcher).

    Tonight, I am sitting in the Haymarket in Northampton. On my right, a man and woman sit with their knees interlocked, not in dining foreplay, but because their table is quite small. They lean into each other, laughing over the wrought-iron garden table, and underneath, they have the same napkin spread across their laps.

    Another pair of women just left the cafe, smiling down at me and wishing me good luck on my homework, which I’ve been half-heartedly glancing over while I surreptitiously observe the people around me, under the guise of the concentrating student. These fellow patrons were so friendly because about forty minutes ago, they laughed hysterically at Kara when she not-so-subtley stole a candle from another table for me to hold over my textbook and not go blind from reading in the dim, ambient light.

    They probably thought that they had observed a simple favor between students, but Kara stole that candle out of love. What would I do without her?  Maybe I’d get more homework done.

  • Midnight:23 In the Library

    I’m working on a paper that isn’t due until the last day of classes.

    I’ve just returned from the stacks with a reference book. As if it isn’t satisfying enough that the lengthy row of call numbers actually lead to the floor, to the hallway, to the aisle, to the shelf, to the spine of the exact book that I need, sometimes it seems like a lucky coincidence that the College happens to own a title that I have never seen on a bookstore shelf. Then I look up at the ornate chandeliers, the sweeping rafters with mermaids carved into the supporting angles, and I’m struck with the reminder I’m not just shopping at Barnes and Noble in the middle of the night.

  • Mama Bear and Papa Bear

    My mom called last night on her way home from work with some sad news: Stan Berenstain of Bears fame passed away. “What about Jan?” I asked mournfully. Later, I downloaded the NPR clip and listened with a flashback of pages and pages of fur-filled illustrations turned in my mind. Stan and Jan Berenstain met on the first day of art school in 1941 and published more than 200 picture books about the Bear family, Mama, Papa, Sister and Brother (and, much later, Honey Bear) together.

    A bookshop owner spoke about the continuing success of the early works in the series, in spite of the fact that, as consumer demand increased, the couple leaned into a pattern of stories that fit into the same mold and usually had an educational message. The shop owner reasoned that stories like The Berenstain Bears and the Truth and The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food were “less entertaining and more of a lesson.”

    But Stan and Jan were a pair of artists who based their series on bears because they are fun to draw, and the illustrations always entertained me. When All Things Considered played an audio clip from The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers, the first thing I remembered was the images of Brother and Sister’s perception of strangers: a man with a crooked cane and a snarling lip, a woman in a tattered dress with dead flowers in her hat. A few pages later, after Mama bear has gently pointed out that not all strangers lurk in shadows and hand out poisoned apples, the cubs envision the same characters. This time, the man winks, the flowers in the old woman’s hat have perked up.

    In pre-school, I thumbed through those books again and again to follow the pictures, memorizing the story until I thought I could read just because I knew the books so well that I always knew what happened on the next page. I even went through a phase when I called my parents Mama and Papa. Only, my dad never wore a ten gallon hat like Papa Q. Bear.

  • It’s Okay To Be From Fairfield County

    In the Spring, Bissell’s Pharmacy and Gail’s Stationhouse, two spotlights on Ridgefield’s quintessential Main Street, burned down in the middle of the night. I was in New Zealand, where I read the news in an e-mail, so I didn’t see the gaping hole in the small town facade until June. By that time, both businesses had decided not to rebuild and had hung ribbons and thank-you-signs on the chain link fence that went up around the charred foundations.

    Bissell’s was adorable, in it’s time, but it sort of smelled funny and was nowhere near as convenient as the massive CVS branch down the street. I wasn’t sad to see Gail’s go, since I became intimately familiar with what I found to be disgraceful business practices when I worked there for all of eight hours with no break and no tips and almost no paycheck at all last summer.

    Now, when I’m home, I drive by the gap in the row of Main Street shops (mostly antique stores and private realtors, with The Gap and a French cafe in the middle) and I don’t bat much of an eye.

    This morning, however, Lily made me really miss the idea of the small town pharmacy. I was helping her carry her stuff out to my car on our way back to school, and making the requisite purring noises over her Vera Bradley duffel bag. She said, “Yeah, that is, basically, the best,” even though she had apologized for her Fairfield County luggage when we drove home together for Thanksgiving last year, “it makes me so sad to think of all of them burning away when Bissell’s had that fire!”

    I stopped in my tracks on her front walk, the yellow quilted bag slung over my shoulder. Lily looked as though she might regress into a second mourning period.

    “And all that Burt’s Bees stuff, too.”

    When I admitted that I might have been tempted to dash through flames to preserve such amenities, she just nodded woefully.

  • Giving Thanks

    At Thanksgiving, I remember one year in high school, eating cold creamed onions in my grandmother’s dark kitchen, sitting awake late into the night in front of AOL with my cousin Marie.

    This year, the day began with three inches of snow and ended with berry crumble from my grandmother*. In the middle, I ate Thanksgiving dinner in jeans that I haven’t been able to wear since the summer after I graduated high school.

    After I had folded white paper napkins neatly and lay them out on the table, my mom insisted on taking them back and sent me for the nice cloth napkins. The dark green did not go with the blue placemats I’d set out earlier, but I was not going to ask questions when the woman was brandishing the carving knife. When we sat down to dinner, my mom somehow managed to say grace even as she bit back fits of giggles at the motley table I’d set. My grandmother just kept saying, “This is the new style, nothing is supposed to match.” The dog stared at the leftover turkey without blinking for four whole minutes.

    * Not to be confused with this Applejack Cobbler recipe for a Thanksgiving themed cocktail, featured today in the NYT.

    November 23, 2005
    Adapted from the Pegu Club

    1 cup sugar
    12 ounces cranberries, washed and picked over
    1 orange slice 1¼-inch thick, cut in half
    2 ounces applejack
    1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
    1/2 ounce apple schnapps
    2 dashes of Angostura bitters
    1 teaspoon pomegranate molasses.

    1. For the cranberries: add sugar to 1 cup water in heavy-duty pot and simmer over low heat until sugar dissolves. Add cranberries, and stir frequently until berries are soft, about 10 minutes. Cool before making cocktails, which require about two tablespoons per drink. (The rest can be used as sauce or refrigerated for several weeks.)

    2. To make one cocktail, put two tablespoons of softened cranberries (about an ounce) and orange slices in a cocktail shaker and muddle together. Add ice, then remaining ingredients. Shake vigorously and pour into a cocktail glass.

    3. Garnish with something decorative, like an edible flower, an orange twist or a gooseberry with skin peeled back.

    Yield: One drink.

    Multiply recipe as needed for family events.

  • A Thanksgiving Easter Egg

    My worst habit is my incessant need to highlight and de-highlight text as I read at the computer. It started when I tried to catch up on seasons of missed ER episodes by reading the lengthy Television Without Pity descriptions, all on white background, and my eyes started to burn. The highlighted text had a blue background that went easier on my exhausted retinas. Ever since then, whenever I’m reading something on the Internet, I highlight sections at a time, sometimes drawing shapes, sometimes to a rhythm. I can’t control it.

    I tried to put a stop to it before I came back to school junior year because I knew all the mouse-clicking would drive my roommate crazy. She would say, “you’re highlighting again!” as I stared at pages of The Electronic Canterbury Tales, my face bathed in LCD-glow for hours at a time. Eventually I managed to wear myself down to only doing it on the silent touchpad mouse, but she would still laugh at me. It is a really ridiculous habit.

    But if I wasn’t constantly dancing the cursor around, I would miss stuff like this: click on the left question mark above techinical difficulties turkey’s head at the end of the Thanksgiving 2005 Homestar Runner cartoon.

    STRONG MAD: CAN I KEEP IT? (Bubs’ concession stand, which he is wearing)
    STRONG BAD: No, you can’t keep it, now go put that thing back.
    STRONG MAD: IT FOLLOWED ME HOME! (He ‘absconded’ it and wore is through the Thanksgiving Parade.)
    STRONG BAD: Uh, yeah, that’s not true.

    That’s called an Easter Egg, celebrated all year ’round. Nothing says Happy Holidays like a Homestar Runner cartoon of mockery.

  • You’d Better Be Lo Siento

    At 6:30 this morning, my cell phone rang. It was too early for Tessa to be calling to tell me that I was late to meet her at the gym at 9:30, but I was so disoriented that I jumped out of bed and had my spandex in one hand already when I answered the phone.

    Silence. Click.

    I got back in bed, studying the number in my caller ID and fuming because by now, I was wide awake and I had jumped up so fast that my heart was racing as if I’d already run to the gym. Holding up the cell phone like a miniature Gameboy, I shuffled through the recent calls list and punched ‘Send’ with a passive-aggressive thumb.

    “Hello?”

    “Hi. If you call someone and wake them up at 6:30 in the morning, it would be nice if you at least said something before hanging up.”

    “No…no…” I could tell the poor guy didn’t actually speak english.

    “Well, fine. Good-bye.” My itch for revenge adequately satisfied, I dozed off, curled up with the phone in my hand. At 7:30, it rang again, same number on the caller ID. Because if you dial the wrong number, wait an hour and try again, it might be right this time. Only this time, I was prepared.

    “Hola!” Confused the anonymous caller out of his mind. And then proceeded to scold him in his mother language. Don’t worry, I wasn’t too harsh. My spanish vocabulary isn’t very developed in the reprimanding department, so I told him that it was “not fair and not nice” to call someone ‘en la manana cuando no habla.’ He stuttered out an apology in english. I wanted to tell him that he might as well say ‘lo siento,’ since, by now, we were speaking the same language. Instead, I was reduced to, “Thank you. Have a nice day.”