emlocke

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  • Karma Chameleon: Water Daily

    Tessa says I’m collecting good karma to save for later in my life. Maybe so, but I’m not getting my hopes up. Maybe that’s the point. Bad days (and bad days all in a row) feel like the world’s reminder not to get my hopes up. Be satisfied with a good parking spot and move on. Okay, so I’m the only person I know who’s actually won a free liter of Coke under the bottle top. And I’ve won three. Lucky, right?

    Do you make your own luck? I just try to take care of myself, and between the gym and the banana fritters, I’m not doing so bad. If more karma is coming my way, good or bad, there probably isn’t much I can do to stop it.

  • Chapstick is Not Life Gloss

    Read my lips. When I’ve completely given up on the world, you’ll know it because they’re chapped. The crack down the middle, the white, ragged-edged flakes that rake on the back of my hand are the most outward physical symbols of my defeat. I’m too worn out to go looking for the ‘schtick (why bother). I’m dehydrated (too much coffee and not enough water). I’ve probably been napping (breathing through my mouth when my room gets warm in the afternoon). I’ve probably been chewing at them, peeling layers away until raw patches of red are another wound on display.

    You can’t smear fruity lip gloss on those defeated by the world lips. The sugar stings in the spots where you can taste blood. You need the protective, albeit waxy coat of some purified balm to seal off the damage. It smooths away the prickle but puts up a shiny rampart to ward off any new foes.

  • Maybe My Second-Ever Entry About Crafts


    Lamp Close-Up
    Originally uploaded by EmLocke12.

    I bought the lamp and shade at IKEA for about $11, and 30″ of beaded trim for around $3, and this is what I ended up with! The light really catches the faceted beads just like I wanted it to. There are a couple of spots where the ribbon didn’t stick smoothly along the edge. I’m going to have to fix that because the imperfections are distracting when I’m pretending to study.

    Some of the beads won’t hang straight either, depending on how tautly I pulled the ribbon in an effort to straighten it out. The fifth strand from the left is just a lone wolf. All of its neighbors hang in orderly rows, but that one warps out and curves at the end. It insists on defying gravity.


    New Bag
    Originally uploaded by EmLocke12.

    I have about two inches of the tail of the trim left over, with five strands of beads on it. I’m thinking about cutting off the faceted ones and sewing them on to my new ‘evening bag’ in place of the lame white doughnut beads, which totally don’t go with the gothic class of the gold stitching and emerald [faux] silk. Unfortunately, I need nine replacements, not five.

  • Too Much Metaphor

    If you pull the tab and the tiny staple out of a dry tea bag, dump out the leaves and light one end on fire with a match or a lighter, and let it go, it will soar upward out of your hands, dancing a flitting to and fro, a gauzy hot hair balloon ablaze in the air until it withers away to a weightless mound of ashes. This is an old camp trick, somewhere between ‘don’t play with matches’ and a s’more factory bonfire. It will ignite with the same instant, vital explosion as a roman candle, but so gently that it’s noiseless over the camper’s awed gasps, and then it will be over. The spectacle begins and ends with the same immediacy.

    If only it could dance above you forever, the scent of dry tea leaves in the air. But it is only after the spent ashes have drifted to your feet that the awe sinks in and you realize what has transpired before your eyes. If the beautiful flame never burned away, we would not recognize its impermance or remember its momentary glow like a special secret. It doesn’t have to be a bittersweet ending. The life of the flame is more beautiful just for having been at all.

  • The Uniform In Candy Land


    I want this shirt. Even if it isn’t true, since I am in cookie recovery after a rough stint in cookie rehab, and even though Milk & Cookies have evolved into More [Graham] Crackers?, I want to run down a cookie trail lined with frosting through a meadow of cotton candy, holding hands with the ticklish doughboy with the tummy full of cookie crumbs and eating brownies.

  • Mount Holyoke E-mail Server, Cover Your Ears

    Over the summer, my commercial e-mail account was shuffled back and forth between webmail and client application one too many times. None of the messages remembered where they were supposed to show up and in what order, so the entire archive evaporated. Like the Classics Department joke that Ellie tells about the Greek philosopher who was all “I think, therefore I am,” until one day, when someone asked him if he wanted coffee or something. He said, “I think not,” and vanished into thin air.

    It was my own fault, but I decided that if I couldn’t remember what I was missing, than I wouldn’t miss is that much. The only e-mail that came to mind was the confirmation I received after I registered for Outward Bound. And the only reason that one stuck out in my mind is that I printed at least two copies and memorized the first three lines and sometimes repeat them to a nursury rhyme tune when I try to coax myself out of bed at the beginning of a particularly long day: “Congratulations! You are about to embark on…”

    There are times during every semester when I hold my breath every time I open my school e-mail. [I really hope the server doesn’t hear this and jinx me, but] sometimes, I wouldn’t even freak out too much if that account evaporated somewhere into the world wide web, too! It wouldn’t be my fault that I haven’t read and responded to every one of the six e-mails one of my professor sends every week. I wouldn’t feel guilty about filtering through messages from clubs I’m not actually a part of, beyond the contact list. I wouldn’t have to assemble the puzzle of appointments with people who want all of my waking hours for themselves!

    I’m thinking about setting an auto-response message: “I think not.”

  • Hands On

    I’ve been a pretty cranky blogger of late. I feel like I’m craving something but I don’t know what it is. A little Hypertect Transfer Protocol angst. Hence, the new color scheme on a daily basis and zero new content. You don’t need words, you can read my mind in the irregular appearance of these pages. It’s blue, it’s white, it’s purple, but it’s never quite right. It’s old, it’s new, but then I remember why I ditched an old template in the first place and wonder why I bothered with a new one that looks so unevolved. It’s my own code creation, but the borders don’t match up, or it’s someone else’s and I can’t look at the page without feeling like I’m reading a stranger’s blog.

    And while I do believe in the words above all else, I think that both graphic and technical design are paramount to the blogsphere. The colors and shapes that frame content on the web are another facet of every site’s identity. Books are printed and bound, blogs are coded and published. Aesthetics are part of the genre.

    I go through phases of frantic design research, flipping through blog rings for ideas, tweaking color schemes, Googling for a website that will “walk me through CSS template with small words and big print so a kindergardener could build the damn thing” or “this is what I want my blog to look like. CLICK. GENERATE.” And then I put something together that I feel moderately proud of and leave it alone for a month. But the need to polish the design itself and my own web design abilities is never quelled, and with each fit of fine-tuning (which always becomes an all out over haul), the pressure I put on myself to be every part of this blog grows stronger. I am the writer. Before I was a blogger, I was a writer, that’s what got me here in the first place. But now I want to be the designer, the coder, the art director and the technician, and I want to do it all on my own. I won’t settle for anything less and that makes it hard to fill my own shoes.

    I’ve always been frustrated with painting. Brushes won’t respect my authority. I don’t trust my own hand between my mind’s eye and the canvas. Now, hanging my head before the design and code windows in Dreamweaver, I am fighting the tactile instinct even though I know it’s impossible to reach through the computer screen and nudge each element into place, column widths and pixel borders aside, like a graphic collage of code. I want to be hands on!

  • Blow My Top

    I chose my new hair dryer because it’s purple. It also has three strength settings, three temperature levels, bonus diffuser attachment, and 1875 watts of ionized blow-drying power. Apparently, 1875 watts too many for the Safford energy circuit. When four of us lost power in our rooms after I blew a fuse, my floor mates assured me that this inconvenience was nothing compared to a fire alarm. One said she would have beaten me up if I had burned popcorn and she had to stand out in the cold. This blunder only merited some minor teasing.

    Still, I was in the dark for more than an hour (my room shorted out entirely), and while I sat in the hall waiting for the electrician, I tried to figure out how I would rework my post-shower preening routine. It is in my curls’ best interest if I drench them in product and hit them with the hot air instantaneously after exiting the shower, so I usually blow dry in the buff so I don’t have to manage a towel or robe while performing acrobatics with the diffuser. Now I think I’ll have to throw on my robe and go back to the bathroom to do battle with the ringlets. I will spare my floor mates from blackouts, but I can’t promise I won’t give them an eyeful every time I flip my head over.

  • Rosa Lee

    My aunt e-mailed to tell me that Rosa Parks died yesterday at 92. She said that she remembered that I did a project on her life and times when I was younger. If my presentation on Rosa Parks (there were several, in fact, one in which I dressed up to play her role) made an impact on my aunt, who lived on the other coast when I was in elementary school, it was only because Rosa Parks left such an impression on me.

    She was 42 on the day that she sat on her bus and politely gave the driver permission to call the police and have her arrested because, on that day, she would not give up her seat. She was charged with disorderly conduct because she sat quietly, primly, and said, “you may do that,” rather than stand up and herd to the back of a bus with the others who were asked to move. She said, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old…no, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Tired enough to wake up and say something, do something. To stand up for the first time, by sitting down.

  • Ellie and Tessa

    Telling a story on AIM:

    emons1010: me and tessa, jaws on the floor
    Em Locke 12: I love you guys, I want to come over and hug you right now because when you weren’t typing anything I KNEW it was because you were busy telling tessa.