emlocke

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  • Boundless Dreams of Humble Beginnings

    When I was a kid, I was always going places. I collected firewood, whittled ambitiously large branches and ground up the damp green core inside acorn shells to ‘eat’ in my ‘log cabin’ in the backyard. I scrambled over the neighbor’s stone wall with an invisible St. Bernard to rescue friends pretending to be stranded. At low-tide on Long Beach Island, I collected sea water and shells and crossed rivulets in the sand with my bucket to return to my coastal village beneath our beach umbrellas. I was a Victorian nursemaid to my doll, taking letters to her grandmother and dressing her for tea. My bed became a covered wagon and I lulled myself to sleep each night by imagining that the nightlight was the sun setting on a prairie horizon. I didn’t have imaginary friends; I became imaginary characters and traveled back in time.

    The roles I chose were never lavish, but I was rarely practical. Chelsea moved in to my log house during one playdate and suggested we bring in some “homey things”. She went for pots and pans and I collected my favorite books and a few keepsakes. The whittling was a priority in my backyard village the way leaping across streamlets with appropriate grace was most important in my coastal one. My covered wagon may have been without food and it never seemed to get any closer to its destination, but the historical accuracy of the blue and yellow quilt that I wrapped around myself more than compensated. These details gave sensation and emotion to my daydreams, the most trivial elements brought them to life.

  • 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.

  • The Greatest Compliments I’ve Ever Received

    It’s Halloween 2004 and I’m at a friend of a friend’s apartment for a party, dressed as a cute-not-slutty bunny, munching on my accessory – carrots still wearing their leaves – and wearing pointy black pumps from Target. I walk into a room and one of the guys on the couch sits forward abruptly, holding out his cigarette like an offering and says, “Oh, is it okay if we smoke in your house?” I wrinkle my nose, unintentionally scrunching the black eye-liner whiskers I’ve drawn on my cheeks in a very bunnyesque expression and say, “This isn’t my house.” “Oh,” says the guy, settling back into the couch, “I thought you lived here, you just walked in like you owned the place.”

    After seven years of friendship, Jonathan finally invites us up for the tour of his bedroom. Hardwood floors and a four-poster bed, it’s very elite Texas homestead meets Fairfield county socialite. He apologizes for the closet, a shirt-sleeve is askew. The surfaces are immaculate, everything lined up at right angles, including his 17-inch Apple laptop. “What are your thoughts on the Apple?” I ask, “I’ve been considering making the switch.” Wait, Emily,” Jon says, clutching my elbow as we both gaze down at the Powerbook like a newborn through the nursery window, “You’re not a Mac person? I’ve always thought you were a Mac person!”

    Back to school 2003, I am a freshly matriculated sophomore at Hamilton College, meeting with my new advisor for the first time. “Do you have any writing samples?” Of course I do, in a folder marked Mount Holyoke Writing, which I am holding in my lap against my plaid knee-skirt. I sit with my ankles crossed even as I remind myself that this isn’t a tea ceremony. I’m just feeling academic. The professor skims the first paragraph of whatever essay I have displayed. “Well,” he says, “I’m glad to see that you’ve certainly mastered the art of the complex sentence.”

    It’s the end of freshman year at Mount Holyoke and everything is up in the air. Transfer applications are in but I don’t know where I’ll be at the end of the summer. Allegra asks me if I’m scared, about transfering, about staying, about all the not knowing, and I nod emphatically and tell her I am. She laughs and says, “That’s what I love about you, everything you say is just honest, you always say exactly what you feel.”

  • No, Your Other Left

    As a recently declared Art History minor, it’s not really that alarming that I walked into the Art building for a class on Monday for the very first time since September 2002. It’s still unreasonably cold in there because they keep the AC so regulated to preserve the art work on display, and the chill immediately reminded me of the very first academic blunder of my college career. The night before classes started my first year, I diligently looked up the buildings and room numbers for all of my classes, including my first year seminar, Films in the Aura of Art.

    The next day, I showed up in Dwight, wondered briefly at the enormous size of my first year seminar, and signed the attendance sheet, which was missing the last letters of the alphabet anyway, so I wasn’t surprised not to find my name. I took notes, complete with decorative sketches of film strips along the margins, until 2:30, when the lecture ended and we took a break before screening the first film. When that was finally over at 5PM, I stopped at the Odyssey to buy my new textbook and then headed back to my room to read.

    It wasn’t until I looked for the page numbers on the syllabus that I realized I had just spent all afternoon and part of the evening in Film Studies 200. How immaculately orderly to schedule an intro Film Studies course and an intro Art History course about film on a simultaneous timetable, weekly two and half hour film screening and all. I had to e-mail my intended professor and explain my lengthy blonde moment, and then go return my textbook to the Odyssey.

    It seems that it is protocol for me to embarrass myself at the beginning of every Mount Holyoke Art History course. I whined miserably to my mom on Monday night about the whole Architecture class chucking at me when I made a comment:

    “The professor put up two drawings that some guy had done, one representing his town as it was, which was basically nothing but church steeples and a few piles of dirt, and one predicting the way it would look if it was industrialized, with walls and a real bridge and maybe a factory, and he asked us which one we would want to live in, and no one said anything so I raised my hand and said the one on the…oh no!”

    “What?”

    “No wonder they laughed, of course they laughed, I said I’d want to live in the one on the left, but since I don’t know my right from my left…oh man, I said I’d want to live in the one with the piles of dirt!”

    Mom is amused. She has to hold the phone away from her mouth or her laughter will deafen me.

    “And, wait! It gets worse! I followed up that remarkable statement with the insight that I chose the town on the left because it looked ‘stronger and more permanent!’ The half-a-picket-fence looked stronger to me than, you know, the brick wall with an actual foundation. So the class is laughing because they’re like, ‘Dude, you do whatever you want, but I’d totally go for the industrialized real estate.’”

    “And you just realized this?”

    “Yeah! I just held up my left hand so it looked like an ‘L’ which I restrained myself from doing in class so I wouldn’t look like an idiot.”

  • Lanterns

    lanterns

    Lanterns
    Originally uploaded by EmLocke12.


    Humid afternoon.

  • Going to Class – or – Not Skipping

    In her senior yearbook, my mom is represented by a one-liner quote: “Wanna skip?” I wish I had known that when I got caught skipping class in high school. I hid out in the library when I just couldn’t stand the thought of sitting through another double lab. The library. I cut class in the library.

  • I Still Remember

    New York City means a lot to me. For most of my childhood, between day trips to Broadway or the Met, it was a far-off place, a special occasion, and a million things I could never touch or see or do. The city had never felt so close as it did on September 11th, 2001. These days it seems more possible. People I know live there. I could live there. The millions of things are closer to my reach and across the border from home, or a few hours drive from school, they are more tangible. But there is still the sense that is it so much greater and deeper, in more ways than population or square footage, than I can comprehend.

    It is many homes and one home. Many businesses and one business. Many neighborhoods and one neighborhood. Many destinations and one destination. It is a hum through every district, a collective sigh, a chain reaction of laughter or shouting bouncing back and forth across an island. It is strength in numbers.

    It is gray pavement painted with taxicabs, neon signs, graffiti murals and storefronts all illuminated by the sun’s glare off skyscraper windows and a traffic light on each corner. It is a drive across the Brooklyn Bridge at every time of day or a walk along the Hudson or through Central Park during any season. It is one tree growing in Brooklyn and many, many trees, growing along sidewalks, defying urban concrete with roots and leaves all over the city, year after year. It is the evolution of the unofficial capital of the United States and a beacon to those who seek it around the world.

    Today, during the Weissman Center presentation, “New York Stories,” between clips of footage from PBS‘s 14+ hour documentary on the history of New York, the blue screen projected with the pause symbol and the word “STILL” in the upper-left hand corner. In the moments between full color and black and white images of the city, past and present, this silent background spoke volumes. I am still shocked, still scared, still wounded. I still remember. I still believe in New York.

  • Room to Breathe

    Featuring my new room after four loads in the coupe, five in the dumbwaiter and an uncountable number of trips up and down Safford’s six sets of six stairs. After moving on Tuesday, without a drop of coffee or even edible sustenance, I was so sore that I put sheets down on the bed in the middle of the room and took a nap. Things are slightly more re-arranged now, but I am no less caffeine-stricken!

    There is a punchbowl sized coffee cup on display in Rao’s. I would need to fill it with espresso and slurp it through a straw once a day to make up for all the coffee I’ve missed this week and replenish the caffeine in my system enough to soothe my stubborn headache. Oh, addiction.

  • Flood

    I’ve had a headache since yesterday. It feels like caffeine withdrawal, but it’s centered in my sinuses. It aches with an almost audible twinge between my eyes like I’ve been watching too much TV. I have been. Watching New Orleans fill like a bathtub. Watching parking lots fill up with people, hot and thirsty and tired, just exhausted. Watching a doctor’s eyes fill with determination as he reports on the pitiful state of his crippled hospital. Watching a grandmother’s eyes filled with betrayal, gasping, “We’re Americans.” My headache flares every time I fight back tears. My eyes flood and spill over.

  • I Bring It Upon Myself

    I think I’m doing myself a favor by keeping some favorite websites on the down low. The last thing I need are parents who are not only super-fluent (superfluously so) in every one of the many grammatical, pronunciation and stylistic quirks in the English language, but can also communicate their ways through its substratosphere of pop culture references and lingo. It is for my own sanity that I keep Urban Dictionary my own little vocabulary secret.

    Then the New York Times blows my cover. Tom Cruise jives on Oprah’s couch, inspiring a new way to say “lost your mind,” “took some crazy pills,” or “gone off the deep end” and my dad reads about it. He also learns about “jump the shark” and he and my mom practice using their new hip phrases by referencing every favorite TV show I’ve ever had; Felicity, Gilmore Girls, even Dr. Quinn. They can name the precise moment when each one jumped the shark, usually when the inevitable couple-to-be gets together and the whole series has lost the plot.

    Go ahead, parents, use “lost the plot” in a sentence!