emlocke

emlocke logo with teal letter 'k'

  • It’s Just Emlocke

    On the one year anniversary of my blogging debut, I proudly present an all-new look. Well, all-new in that it’s still purple, it’s still cute, and it’s still wildly hilarious and informative, but now it’s prettier and brighter…oh you know, it’s just emlocke.

  • insomaniac

    this just doesn’t happen to me. i’m the girl who can fall asleep in record time on public transportation, on the beach, in the common room with an hour between classes, or in the staff lounge at camp while people play ps2 wrestling, fight over the computer and spin gossip all around me. i’m the girl who gets out of bed with ten minutes before class and gets tangled up and stuck in her pajamas b/c she’s so rushed. i am not the girl who wakes up before 6:30 and channel surfs through the morning news for pre-work entertainment. but i really just can’t sleep.

    jen and i finally had a knitting lesson last night! we met at starbucks in town and got through three lessons: 1) the slipknot 2) casting on and 3) not knitting too tightly. lauren watched and peanut galleried. after starbucks kicked us out, lauren and i went back to her house so i could watch and peanut gallery while she packed for udel. that turned into “let’s talk a lot until 12:30 am and not get anything accomplished.” but she did show me her dress-up suitcase and it was fun.

    em drove back to bucknell on monday morning, so we held a final redezvous, the starbucks finale, complete with an impromptu fireworks display. the night before that, it was jess’ house for wrap-up analysis and a flip through the j.crew catologue before she went back to colby.

    so after lek leaves tomorrow, i will be the sole survivor of summer 2004. on my own again, i’m planning on a beach day with rach and a few work days back with the cass boys. charlene called me last night to say that the babysitter they’d lined up for the fall backed out already and she needs some last minute help for the first week of school. coincidentally, i need some last minute cash. and i’m curious to see how larry and brian handle the coupe’s backseat.

    quote of the day: “i’ll drive faster, you hold tighter, i’ll get wild, you get wilder” – kasey chambers

  • Broadway and the Bus

    In the third grade, my grandmother took me to see “Cats” at the Winter Garden Theater. I got to miss school for the Wednesday matinee. Since then, she’s been my Broadway agent, exposing me to classics like “Miss Saigon” and “The King and I,” and surprising me with tickets to new shows like “Jane Eyre,” which i recommended to everyone in AP English after I saw it junior year, and again senior year when we read the novel for class.

    Once, we picked up our tickets at the booth in the middle of Times Square.  Grandmom wove her way through the crowd and I followed faithfully, really with no other choice. When she got to the window, she said, “there are two tickets for [whatever we were seeing] under my name, they were held by one of the actresses.” I was astonished. I couldn’t believe my grandmother would lie to try to score tickets! But sure enough, a friend-of-a-friend’s daughter was dancing in the show and she had personally reserved seats for us.

    Today, my booking agent brought us to the city today for see “Wonderful Town” town with my aunt and an old family friend. Through this particular connection, we had third-row seats. The script and the delivery were consistently hysterical, the orchestra exceptionally good (the conductor seemed to be inviting music from the instruments—I love that), and i loved the colorful 1930’s wear. Gregg Edelman, the male lead, was my favorite. His performance was witty and real and there was an essence about him that reminded me of my dad. And his character was an NYC editor. I wonder if he’s looking for a bright-eyed intern.

    On the way home, we had to connect to New Canaan by bus and there was a little girl coming home from a family trip to American Girl place. As I helped her mother prop up one of her two duffle-sized shopping bags, I said something about how much I adored my American Girl doll when I was little, and she said, “Alexis, this girl has an American Girl doll, too!” Alexis, three, hesitated not one instant before hopping down off of her seat to come over and show me the catologue. By the end of the trip, she was in my lap with her blonde head settled back on my shoulder and we were flipping through the pages for the third time. She told me stories about which outfit each doll would wear to their imaginary doll events. Then she unpacked a doll-size wedding dress and waved it back and forth and draped it over my hand, fascinated by the graceful swish of the skirt.

    Alexis probably won’t remember me, but I felt like our lives met and waltzed together in dresses with swishing skirts for a half hour. Maybe when she unwraps some of those new doll clothes for her birthday (September 20th) she’ll say, “Remember the girl on the bus?”

    “Life is mad, life is sweet” – Wonderful Town

  • legal name change

    if you didn’t know already, you do now: emlocke * star is looking forward to a one-year anniversary makeover, including a catchier title.

    my ideas:
    emlocke o’clocke
    emlockety-splot
    em locke special
    emlocke b’glock
    classic locke
    the emlocke shock
    hemlocke – the firestarter

    you know you love it. and if you can identify wacky plays on words/phrases/brand names, i’ll love you, too.

    quote of the day: “what’s hidden in an empty box?” – fortune cookie

  • if i hadn’t been an emily

    Emily Locke White: Your Chinese Name is An Ming
    versed in light

  • sanity management

    i haven’t even thought about packing for school yet. most of my college-specific stuff is still in crates and my trunk in the basement where it lived all spring, but i need to at least make a list of must-have clothing, beauty appliances and lifestyle accessories that i don’t want to forget. and it had better be a short list, since i’m challenging myself to pack light.

    when i get to mount holyoke, i’m going to have so many forms to complete and have signed. i need transfer of credit approval and advisor registration and i haven’t even declared my major yet. in the meantime, i am making a list of sanity management tasks to do before i leave.

    e-mail professors about book lists
    e-mail dweber about advising
    call res life about one card and where to pick up room keys
    call parking office
    complete out-of-state lisence forms in quadruplicate
    online parking registration
    buy planner (pink?) (blue?) (black)
    submit absentee ballot request form
    e-mail registrar about AP credits
    e-mail arcadia university rep about study abroad
    apply for jobs at the SAW center

    crossing things off this list means i won’t wake up every morning trying to remember what i reminded myself not to forget to do right before i fell asleep!

    quote of the day: “hey, man i’m alive, i’m taking each day and night at a time…but someday i’ll be saturday night” – bon jovi

  • Becoming the Pen Name

    What people don’t know is, I’ve been living a double life. There’s the Emily you see around town, pretending to look for a job, drinking coffee and smell-testing whatever shampoo is on sale at CVS. That’s the Emily who reads short stories in her bikini on the deck and always has emergency change in the car and recycles catalogues. Normal, logical things.

    The other Emily, believe it or not, won the “Best Crossover Fiction” category for her Dawson’s Creek meets Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman fan fiction series in 1999. In fact, if you google my full name, skeleton-in-the-closet fan fiction comes up even before my more celebrated url’s. I can only imagine what a google-iterate potential employer might think about those results. Which is why this time, five years later, I used a pen name.

    Oh, did I not mention that that’s the point of this story? Oh right, secret’s out, I wrote another fan fiction. “Gilmore Girls: Lorelai discovers cold cereal. Luke comes over. Someone drinks coffee. A fluffy, pocket-sized L&L story that takes place eventually after Raincoats and Recipes. It’s sweet like Cool Whip.” It’s been a long, dry summer of re-runs, and I am so anticipating the getting-together of Gilmore Girl’s Luke and Lorelai, that I wrote a story and it was so cute, if I do say so myself, that I posted it for all. And I’m not ashamed. After all, no reason to hide such high quality writing, no matter what the genre.

    Quote of the day: “Promise me this, you will never understand me. Promise me this, you will always, always hold me, like you’re holding me now .” – Pancho’s Lament

    Newsflash Update – September 18th, 2004
    Fan fiction Emily (that’s not my pen name) strikes again. And I have reviews! Like, “lovely, lovely.”

  • thirty days ’til my skirty craze

    thirty days until classes start. thirty days until syllabi, textbooks, lecture notes, writing conferences and all the other abc’s of fall semester. i wish i could go back for the beginning part, with fresh notebooks and the autumn snap in the air – actually, i wish i had a pleated plaid skirt to wear across the green. but then i’ll come home when all the leaves have fallen and i lose my highlighter, when four flights of stairs aren’t a novel workout anymore, when the spiral in my notebook gets bent out of shape and people start disappearing into the library for consecutive days at a time.

    truman capote’s breakfast at tiffany’s, which i’ve never read, is this week’s selection for the times‘ ‘great summer read’ series. i took the first chapter to the gym this afternoon. but i still read glamour in the chaise lounge while i ate lunch, so don’t get all concerned, i’m not overextending myself during my intellectual summer vacation. i like tiffany’s. i think late 50’s novels tend to attract me; on the road was published in 1957, the year before breakfast at tiffany’s. which reminds me, with only thirty days, when will i finish all the other books i’ve started this summer?

    maybe right after i find that pleated skirt.

    quote of the day: “the summer’s all in bloom, the summer is ending soon. it’s all right, and it’s nice not to be so alone, but i hold on to your secrets, in white houses” – vanessa carlton

  • Country Clubbing

    Yesterday, I had lunch with my grandmother and my aunt at the country club, where I remember swimming lessons in the pool and easter egg hunts on the putting green when I was little. They’ve renovated the whole thing now, but they used to have open air cabanas, and I remember my mom wrapping me up in a towel when I got out of the pool, probably comforting me after a traumatic swimming lesson.  I would sit backward in her lap while she combed the chlorine from my hair.  I remember hugging her and looking over her freckled shoulder up at the summer sky.

    Grandmom, Amy and I sat in the sun and the breeze on the patio and I felt like we’d wandered right into the 1920’s just in time for a garden tea party. I am counting my chicken quesadilla among the top five meals of my life, right up there with fish and chips on the terrace at Epcot Center Rose and Crown and pizza on the volcanic beach in Chile.

    Will’s CIT session at Camp ended yesterday, so my mom and I went to pick him up. It was so beautiful in the Berkshires last night – my favorite time of day of my favorite part of the season at camp, when there’s a refreshingly crisp twinge in the air. It reminded me of the nights when we would all put on sweatpants and fleece and lie around watching for shooting stars, and how my bare feet would always get cold because I never remembered or bothered to wear socks, but how I felt warm enough anyway.

    Will is awesome in his (my) staff shirt. The first thing he said was, “there are so many people who want me to tell them when you get here,” and let me give him a hug.

    Quote of the day: “So turn up the corners of your lips, part them and feel my finger tips, trace the moment, fall forever” – Dashboard Confessional

  • the magic’s in the earrings

    i have a lot of favorite jewelry. my tiffany’s, of course. my elephant cuff from thailand. my camp jewell bracelets inspired by the ‘good’ beads in a&c. my giant purple gemstone flower ring from china town (which i don’t wear b/c i think i have webbed fingers). i love it all, and i wear it when i remember to put it on. but i haven’t worn earrings on a non-special occasion in years. when the chandelier style came ‘in,’ i was tempted, but i couldn’t find the perfect pair, so i gave it up. which is why it was such a surprise when i purchased earrings at american eagle last week.


    the secret to my success: beautiful energy life force earrings
    Posted by Hello

    i am in love. they are delicate, romantic and graceful. they are the perfect shape and color. they have just the right amount of dangle. i think they are magical. yes, they are my lucky secret power energy life force earrings and when i put them on, my ear lobes glow and i can read minds!

    well, they make me feel pretty.

    quote of the day: “i’ve got the world on a string, i’m sittin’ on a rainbow, got the string around my finger, what a world, what a life, i’m in love” – sinatra