emlocke

emlocke logo with teal letter 'k'

  • mission accomplished, or something

    yesterday morning, when i heard that saddam hussein had been captured, it took me a minute to really believe what had gone down while i slept. on the one hand, here is this tyrannical, narcissistic, violent coward in handcuffs, finally. on the other hand, it was a very anti-climactic end to the eight month show-down. even the captain who found hussein in his hole in the ground with his mars bars and his rotting fruit said, “there it was. it wasn’t the blaze of glory we expected.” god bless them for their sacrifices and their bravery, they got lucky. they were on their day off for heaven’s sake.

    and what does this change, really? those soldiers won’t get home for christmas. iraq is still a bedlam of economic and political chaos. international alliances have been jeopardized. the random deaths of american soldiers and the war itself still go without honest justification. confusion and uncertainty reign both iraq and american now that hussein has been dethroned. and osama bin laden, remember him? he still sleeps in his own cave somewhere in afghanistan.

    i guess mr. bush looks pretty good right now. he woke up one white house morning to discover that 600 soldiers (he’ll never know their names) had fulfilled the bush legacy he’d been holding out for since i was in the first grade.

    i still love you, america. peace.

    quote of the day: “ladies and gentleman, we got him.” – l. paul bremer

  • my brain says ouch

    not only did today, the ultimate friday, mark the end of classes for week, but the culmination of the entire semester. that’s right, my afternoon nap today should have been blissful. instead, it didn’t even exist! at this point, i would liken my head to a circus with the lights out; it’s a wild party in there, but it’s too dark to sort it all out! doesn’t translate well on paper, or into html as the case may be. i know it must have something to do with the fact that i haven’t been getting enough sleep. and i don’t just mean that i’ve been missing my nap every day! let’s see, i slept for about six hours last night, took a nap between six and eight am on thursday morning, and before that, i hadn’t slept since tuesday afternoon. i’m sore from trying to stay conscious.

    on the upside, classes are over, and i have three days before my lit exam. i’m almost done. cj said we could play taboo this weekend. i also discovered classic boggle online, which i am holding out for so i can really enjoy it. and by this time next week, i’ll probably be home, safe and sound. that’s seven days, 168 hours, 10,080 minutes, 604,800 seconds. i think. i’m not really in a math state of mind right now. i don’t even know if i’m in a human state of mind!

    quote of the day: “way to conjure!” – sabrina the teenaged witch

    love always, em locke

  • he’s my little brother

    my little brother is taller than me, but it’s still his birthday today! william is sixteen years old, which means that this is the first of those big milestone birthdays. eighteen and twenty-one aren’t far beyond. and the boy has already founded a successful dj business and is the administrator of a popular gaming internet community. congratulations, will. even though i had a tendency to smack you around a little and throw tantrums at your birthday parties when we were younger, i love you, and i promise not to cry at your party this year!

    yes, it’s true. william and i didn’t always get along as children. i know it’s hard to believe. but we had our moments. we invented a tickling game called hot dog dough and a hide-and-seek game that we used to play in the parking lot while we waited for our mom to run errands. i loved that game, and for the record, i think we should play it more frequently.

    my favorite two weeks of the year are when william and i are at camp together. i get really excited about his arrival and i force people to guess which camper is my brother and i get a lot of “the one who looks like you, only taller and not a girl?” i never realized how much we look alike until people saw us together at camp and could hardly tell us apart. i love following him around all session and borrowing stuff from him and lending him stuff. one summer he offered to beat up a boy who made me cry. this summer he was an l.i.t., which involved milestones like his solo overnight and his twenty-four hour experience. on that night, he was still hanging out in the trading post when i got cq’d at staff curfew. outrageous! and i love it when other staff continue to rave about how considerate and polite and funny he is even after he’s gone home. yeah, he’s my brother.

    quote of the day: “your love is better than ice cream, better than anything else that i’ve tried.” – sarah mclachlan
    love always, em locke

  • AIM as a contact sport

    Following an unusual influx of intramural (IM) athletics e-mail announcements, I got this all-campus e-mail:

    “The IM instant messenger season will be starting shortly after the Thanksgiving break. iIwill need your rosters and team captains ASAP so that I can make the schedule. I am thinking we will have 30 minute regattas with one 5 minute water break. Teams in the B-league must be co-ed and may not have more than three varsity players. There will be no anonymous warnings and no checking non-league players away messages. Finally, we will not permit two finger typing and penalties will be given for lol’s and brb’s. Get your teams in soon, because OMG this is going to be a tough competition!”

    Now there’s a sport i could get into. Varsity MVP here I come!

    Quote of the day: “Fa fa-fa fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, never be the same again. Fa fa-fa fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, never be the same again.” – Guster

    Love always, em locke

  • frozen cosmos

    nayomi came over today and asked me to help her decide whether or not to join this special kenya class. it was one of those decisions that had too many factors and subfactors to keep them all straight with just one brain, but i thought it was funny that she wanted me to help, since we all know i’m the worst decision maker in the new world. but i suggested that we make a pros and cons list just so she could organize her thoughts more tangibly so they wouldn’t just clank around in her head and drive her crazy.

    minutes later, a sleepy cj wandered into my room and said, “did somebody say frozen cosmopolitans?” we just thought he was being a lush. but he finally explained himself when we met at the diner tonight – turns out he actually wanted to know, “no, really, did somebody say frozen cosmopolitans?” it’s true, the phrases sound quite similar. i counted to three and made him say “frozen cosmopolitans” while i said “pros and cons list” and they definitely match. try it with your friends. maybe over a round of cosmos?

    two people told me i was cute today. both were girls. but they were right, i am really, really cute. feel free to comment further on this subject. and rach thinks i should create a new screen name: theOneAndOnlyEmLocke.

    lauren and i decided that jen‘s hiatus didn’t count until she formally announced it, so i submitted the following official statement: “lauren and i wanted to let you know that we don’t think you can be officially on hiatus until you post an official hiatus notification. we think that would be appropriate (and would give us a little something to read while we’re not doing our work, which is a lot of the time.)” well, jen responded graciously with a new post, but gave someone else, some columbia guy credit for the hiatus protest! where’s the love, jen?

    quote of the day: “there is always some madness in love; but there is also always some sense in madness” – nietzsche

    love always, em locke

  • cuddle up

    in an effort to entertain myself while procrastinating this afternoon (procrastination is hard work! it can get boring after awhile if you don’t know how to occupy your time), i ended up at the official care bears website. i didn’t actually have a lot of care bears as a kid. in fact, i don’t even remember if i actually saw any of the movies, and i know i wasn’t a frequent watcher of the show. but i did have a care bears towel which i loved. it had a rainbow that flowed from top to bottom and five of the care bears were sliding down it holding up their little paws with the heart prints.

    i never even knew the care bears well enough to have a favorite one, but today i wouldn’t know which one to pick! i appreciate bedtime bear for obvious reasons. even though he’s sleepy during the day, he encourages friend bear to overcome her fear of the dark and at night he helps everyone sleeps and gives them sweet dreams. but i also really like wish bear b/c she has a shooting star and she helps wishes come true and her fur is aqua. but i feel like i should be loyal to share bear b/c she’s lavender and apparently “gets distracted by the strangest things at the worst times.” i feel her on that!

    what i never noticed was the underlying romantic twist on the care bear social scene. share bear has a crush on funshine bear and love-a-lot bear has a crush on tenderheart. and on top of all that, there was some “relationship challenegs” around the love-a-lot round table (which was actually shaped like a heart) between bears playing tricks on each other and teasing each other and good luck bear’s powers don’t even work when he’s around cheer bear! what drama!

    i did have a lot of popples though. they rolled up inside out and had different color hair and ear and really big pom-pom tails. i had party, who was all kinds of pink and liked to, well, party. i had p.c., whose apparently was the big gun popple, but i always considered him party’s second in command. and i had potato chip, who was smaller and not as furry, but still cute and made me think it was okay to eat potato chips, but my mom never went for that one. i had a mini pocket popple model of pretty bit which was my favorite b/c it was purple and i could take it wherever i went, including church, although i brought a fair share of full-sized stuffed animals to sunday school in my day. according to the website, pretty bit also liked to write poetry. finally, when my brother was born, my parents gave me a baby popple named bibsy (although i remember calling her cribsy…but that may have been an oversight directly resulting from the emotional confusion of giving birth to a child.) wow, that was quite a big collection! popples were good for hugging.

    quote of the day: “if this is how life is supposed to be, i will have none of it.” – danny

    love always, em locke

  • read lauren’s blog

    oh and also, eat at joe’s. that’s ahhhbviously some hype for lauren since i couldn’t figure out how to get the comment feature to look right until i copied her html action. nice work, lek, and thanks for letting me mooch.

    i don’t think i’ve mentioned this before, but i love my room. when i walked in at 9:30 yesterday morning, after a four hour drive, i had forgotten how cute it is. i love the window with my curtains, the little shelf with my printer and my plant and my painting and my desk with the bulletin board and the bookshelf and the pull out writing desk. i love my bed with the duvet my mom made and my tapestry and the purple sheets and the wall with all the hooks and the purple christmas lights and my giant collage. i love having my guitar in the corner and my sunset chair under the window. i love that my bed has four tall posts (my bed at home actually felt short!) and my favorite furniture item ever, my wrought iron nightstand by my bed, with my african violet on it and all the drawers perfectly organized. i even love the carpeting, even though it’s, well, used. i got really lucky. i’m going to miss it.

    but i’ll have other rooms. i’ll have my own rooms and rooms that i share with people i love and rooms that i get to keep for more than one year b/c i own them. maybe i’ll even design and build my rooms. in my future, i see hardwood floors, plush carpeting, tall, slender shelves and chests, romantic, luxurious beds, subtle lighting, giant chairs, and lots and lots of ecclectic and coordinated accessories. i want my bookcases to be home to books of all different shapes and sizes and colors and my linens to match. i want every room in my house to be a different, beautiful color – so different that you’re consciously aware of it. like, “wow, now i’m in the kitchen!” with emphasis.

    quote of the day: “this is where i meet my muse…of all the rooms i’ve loved before, it’s you i love inside this room” – lisa loeb

    love always, em locke

  • just to say ‘chai’

    heading back to school tomorrow morning at fiiiiiiiiiive am! it sucks to get up so early, but it’s nice to have an extra night at home. lauren was home most of today, too, so we went to the patisse for vanilla chai. okay, no late night starbucks, but it was so so good to see lek and hang out for awhile. i love the patisserie for its independence and its frenchness and its cuteness. and its vanilla chai. and i love lauren!

    after break we only have ten days of classes. i have two more jazz concert reports to write and a twelve page research paper on “my favorite artist” due next week. i have to write seven to twelve pages of something for lit, but it can be something more creative and personal. i have a psych paper and an exam and my final project for comp sci is a twenty page research paper translated into html (good thing i’m such an expert, right lek?). and when all that’s done, i don’t know what i’ll do with myself. goodness! i hope i can find a few finals to take!

    quote of the day: “i’ve become a real believer in not defining every single thing. seems like everytime you think you’ve figured out what something is, it just becomes something else.” – “felicity”

    love always, em locke

  • gamma sigma chapter #679

    when we were in middle school and certain members of our troop didn’t think they could balance being celebrated members of the sixth grade and girl scouts at the same time, someone invented “great superstitions,” which was a cryptic reference to our troop meetings. now, first of all, there are plenty of words in the english language, or better yet, foreign languages, since secrecy was the goal, that begin with the letters ‘g’ and ‘s’ – and someone put ‘great’ and ‘superstitions’ together? what does that even have to do with girl scouts? or girls? or scouts? or meetings? so maybe that says something about the people who christened this phrase, b/c my second major complaint is, if you’re going to deny our existence until thursday afternoons and then be a snot (yeah, that’s the word i chose) during meetings anyway, why don’t you save yourself all the coverup production and quit? unless you’re really into espionage. whatever.

    even up into high school (before they spooked and stopped talking about it completely) these particular members would ask, “are you going to great superstitions?” and i would say, “what? am i going to girl scouts? yeah! see you there!” cue blushing, snotty (there it is again) glare and ashamed scurrying.

    well, we all went to the rumpf’s house for a little girl scouts reunite yesterday at eight, and it was weird to have a girl scout meeting, even if was only representative, that started so long after dark. me, jill, meryl, melissa, ashley, kristin and mrs. rumpf all hung out and told funny stories. i love those girls. and after eight years of masquerading as a mysterious nonsensical club (some of us dabbled in great superstitions membership at one point or another) we finally came up with a cool password that was actually cool. why not be a sorority? and so, gamma sigma was born. now i just wish we all lived in the house together. and that mtv and ikea decorated that house.

    then meryl and i went over to jenn’s house to play trivial pursuit with jenn and kate and corinne and a couple girls from gw. twentieth anniversary edition, baby.

    quote of the day: “make new friends, but keep the old. one is silver and the other gold” – make new friends

    love always, em locke

  • it’s time to go home

    there is no more motivation here! i’m ready to hit ridgefield and do some laundry without quarters and challenge my dad’s snood scores. chelsea is going to london to visit friends but maybe i’ll see jill and melissa and jen wants to hang out with people on wednesday and i want to see toni and lauren and jess. i really want to experience peppermint hot chocolate and 24-hourness at starbucks and have a long conversation that is equally as goofy as it is deep. especially with someone who knows me beyond september. there’s something about the understood history between old friends.

    it’s so silly that we have to wait until tuesday to go home. of course, i suppose i should be grateful. ricky goes to school in canada where, surprise, believe it or not, they don’t celebrate american thanksgiving and he doesn’t get any days off. so he has to stay at school and just come home for the weekend. that sucks for ricky and his number one female fan, who will be conveniently based in ridgefield this week.

    quote of the day: “homeward bound, i wish i was homeward bound. home where my thought’s escaping, home where my music’s playing, home where my love lies waiting silently for me” – paul simon

    love always, em locke