last night i went over to nayomi’s friends’ room in south to chill and watch tv. south is an incredible dorm. huge rooms, private bathrooms, fireplaces, big windows, it’s all beautiful. but it’s all quads, and friends, you know i love you, but all those warm fuzzy feelings would be fleeting if we ever had to live together. those rooms would be paradise if i could register to live with isabellephant, muggsy and maggie zelda. but it’s a nice place to visit and we chilled out and watched tv.

after a while cj showed up and we played taboo, which is one of those games that freaks you out until you forget all the words you ever knew. it’s like creative mental excercise. so confusing, but really fun.

today is kelsey’s birthday so we’re going out to applebee‘s later on. i’m so in the mood for a nap, but i’m going to hold out for some quesadillas and cheesecake.

quote of day: “if you can walk, you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing.” – african proverb

love always, em locke

one of the things i remember about all my tours at hamilton is the sage hockey rink, where the citrus bowl is held at the beginning of the hockey season every year. legend has it that everyone sneaks oranges past the frisking and after hamilton scores its first goal, they bombarde the ice and the opposing team’s goalie. sounded exciting to me. well, this year they cracked down on the fruit throwing. it is, after all, disrespectful to fruit. oh, and the opposing team.

but i really wanted to go anyway. at the last minute, i called quinn and she said i could go with her and her friends. so we went over, waited in line, got stripped searched (no, not really), were presented with free t-shirts and inflatable hockey sticks, and watched the game. hamilton lost to babson 4 to 6, but the game was good and the hamilton pride was refreshing, as was the tangy citrus scent that lingered in the air after that first goal. somebody was hiding oranges somewhere!

after the game, i went to see the buffers with quinn and her friends, and the concert was pretty good. i stayed almost until the very end, until i was so hungry that i couldn’t hear the a cappella harmonizing over my growling stomach. so i said goodnight, brought food from the diner back to my room and watched tv for awhile before going to bed. honestly, i was all socialized out. i think i need to construct my stamina gradually. but i managed to spend almost five consecutive hours outside of my room with several strangers and the night didn’t culminate with a panic attack or a seizure. that was enough for one night.

quote of the day: “i don’t need what you don’t got” – goo goo dolls

love always, em locke

i gave my group presentation on terry tempest williams’ refuge today in lit. it was my first real public speaking experience since the dissection speech for peer mentoring last year. and, in my opinion, it went pretty darn well. i typed everything out word for word and double spaced it, in case my vision went bleary from sheer panic, but i didn’t forget how to read and was even able to ad-lib a little bit without stumbling over the english language.

i think i benefitted from the fact that this week has had me so stressed out that i didn’t even have time to get nervous about the presentation. and the fact that all the people in my group were really, really nice and that one of them brought up stage fright before i did didn’t hurt either.

i have one more section of my jazz paper to write, and then i have all afternoon tomorrow to edit it. i’m really glad i took initiative on this one. i felt like i was far enough along last night to just take the evening off, watch sorority life and knock out at eleven. then i got up at seven this morning to register, went to jazz, made an appearance at fitness, had just enough time to shower, straighten my hair and put make up on (b/c i figured, if i did faint before my presentation, i would at least want to look nice) before i met my group at 12:30. i even scheduled in a quick (and by quick i mean an hour and a half) post-class nap before i started working again. today was a lesson in efficiency.

by five o’clock tomorrow, all this stress will be over. and one week from today is thanksgiving!

quote of the day: “the universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” – eden phillpotts

love always, em locke

nayomi’s hamster (that’s not an authentic photo) balki kind of intimidates me. he’s so adorable, but he’s also little and squirmy and i’m afraid to pick him up lest i squish him.

but balki and i got intimate tonight when he crept out of his house under nayomi’s bed, under her door, across the hall, under my door, across the room, under my desk and between my feet. hmm. i looked down to see a furry white rodent butt wriggling away. and my first thought was, “the one time i’m eating grapes, a good healthy snack, and i attract mice!” but then i recognized the little face, which looked up at me just before dashing under the bed, and realized that this animal belonged to someone! he has a mommy and a house and a hamster ball to get home to! so i thought fast (good thing i’m so quick witted) and ran down the hall to find kelsey, who has two gerbils of her own and is a rodent afficionado.

she came and we caught him and it was really, really funny. but i don’t know what i would have done if she hadn’t been there! she took him back to her room and let him run around in her rolly ball for a few hours before nayomi came back from work.

i do kind of like the little critter now. he’s obviously motivated and i feel like we shared a moment.

quote of the day: “dare to be naive.” – buckminster fuller

love always, em locke

i can’t decide whether or not breaking up with someone who you were never technically with is any easier than normal break ups. any thoughts? it certainly is odd. but i’m really proud of myself for making the graceful exit. gotta focus on the books anyway, right?

speaking of books, i called my jazz professor this afternoon to get my midterm make up assignment. you know, the one i have to write b/c i missed the exam. he said he couldn’t give me the same exam b/c it would put other students at a disadvantage, which made me feel pretty low. like he assumed that i intentionally missed the test and got someone to tell me what was on it. i wanted to point out that i have no friends in the class – who would have given me the questions? but truthfully, giving me a writing assignment is probably putting everyone else at a comparable disadvantage. i can’t help it if writing is just my thing.

get this: the very second after i got off the phone, i sat down and started researching. i’ll be done by friday at five with time to spare. how motivated am i?

quote of the day: “i don’t wanna be in your fantasy. i wish you’d move to china or the moon.” – marry me jane

love always, em locke

after i see a concert, there’s always this fuzzy afterglow period where try to grasp the concept that i spent time in the same room as a famous, talented musician from a world completely different than mine. today is no different. i can’t stop thinking about the fact that famous, talented, and wonderful ani difranco and i shared the same airspace last night. just the fact that our lives could meet like that for an hour and a half in one room shocks me. granted, that one room was the very large mullins center, but ani can make even a stadium seem intimate. i felt like we were just hanging out, you know, ani and em’s annual jam session.

it was cool to go with rachel b/c she was an ani live virgin. in fact, she had only been really introduced to ani last spring at hampshire a cappella. (hampshire? a cappella? yeah, i was puzzled, too, but they were good.) at the time, my whole face was swollen shut with hay fever, but they sang “heartbreak even,” and rachel was like, “who’s this?” and with that, her curiosity was piqued.

so we had dinner with a couple of rachel’s friends at the black sheep in amherst and then we went over to the concert, where we ran into melissa (i’ve seen all of my ani concerts in mel’s presence, and this one counts, too) and quinn, and then went in for the opening act, which was a strange guy and his guitar. the highlight was his backup on bass, who seemed to have a very affectionate, erotic attraction to his instrument. between songs he rested his temple against it and there was some noticeable caressing action.

finally, ani! she’s on a solo tour, but she plays that guitar so hard, it’s incredible. songs she played: swan dive, angry anymore, little plastic castle, independence day, second intermission, dilate. she recited “self evident,” which is her 9/11 & america poem, and played “evolve” for her first encore. yes, the first of two! then she came back out to play gravel, which was great in and of itself b/c it was the only song i recognized at my very first concert. and then, just when i was thinking, “it’s ok if she doesn’t play ‘both hands,’” she whispered something to the guitar guy who hangs out in the wings, and he brought her guitar back, and she went at it again, with the very first chords of my favorite song. i almost died. and instead i just cried. it felt like the whole song was filling me up. it was awesome.

the one year that chelsea and i actually went to camp together, our jc christy would play “both hands” on her guitar before we went to sleep. we were twelve then, and we didn’t understand, but we knew we liked it and i remember going home after the session and writing down all the lyrics we could remember in this notebook. when i was a cc at camp two summers ago and i started singing my own campers to sleep, i wanted to pass it on. the best part was third session when one of my most awesome campers ever would request it every night. she’d say, “can you sing the ‘graffiti on my body’ song?” i told her to download the real thing when she got home and when she did she said, “i listened to it, but you’re so much better.” maybe one day she’ll understand, too.

we finished off the night with ice cream at bart’s, which was so cute. ani and ice cream, it doesn’t get better than that.

quote of the day: “and both hands, now use both hands. oh, no don’t close your eyes. i am writing graffiti on your body, i am drawing the story of how hard we tried” – ani difranco

love always, em locke

finally, the snow! i do really love snow. it always feel special, it has a way of making average stuff funnier and more exciting. the snow storm was the best part about my day. and this fun link from jessy was another highlight.

i wrote to the mhc girls and asked them to try and find me a yearbook from last year. it would be really, really sad if i graduated college only owning three yearbooks. as it is, they’re not going to match! but holly found one for me! i’m so relieved. ok, so it’s a pretty negligible issue in the grand scheme of things. but it’s important to me to be sentimental and have those keepsakes. and, you know what, the grand scheme of things hasn’t really been working in my favor lately. better to savor the little things.

quote of the day: “because when i look around i think this, this is good enough, and i try to laugh at whatever life brings, because when i look down, i just miss all the good stuff, when i look up, i just trip over things” – ani difranco

love always, em locke

today started at 6:55 am, when i got up to register for a sophomore seminar for next semester. big competition. lots of pressure. gotta jump in on the server before it gets crowded with everyone else. luckily, last names beginning with s-w were up first. unluckily, i had the wrong password. i tried for forty minutes before i found a secret backdoor into the registration site and got the last spot in the class i wanted, globalization & media.

then it was time for history of jazz at nine, and even though i had been awake for two hours already, i was still late, as usual. so i walk right into a comment about “the midterm.” little late for a midterm, right? well, i thought so, too, and since it’s been put off this long, i think i had just decided that it might never happen. never did i think it would happen this week! yeah, that’s right, on thursday we have our huge exam. not only do i have to know all about the social and racial effects of the slave trade, four or five different musical movements, elements of jazz, the life stories of six different musicians, etc, but we have a listening section (a la high school language classes, such negative de ja vu) and we have to identify soloists, techniques and instruments just by listening! so we have a three hour listening review session tomorrow night, and the exam is the next morning. oh, good, review! but wait, when am i supposed to study if i’m listening to a semester’s worth of jazz for three hours the night before the test?

after class i ran into the registrar to get my real password so i can register for the rest of my classes next week, and then i had fitness at the gym, which sucked b/c i was already drenched from the rain and grumpy from the day. then i dashed to the library to print out the fifty-three page reading assignment for lit & environment. guess i didn’t get to read that before class. not as bad as last week though, when i looked at the syllabus and realized that i didn’t even own the book we were reading for class. minor oversight.

at twelve there was a representative from the institute for study abroad from butler university, which was informative, but stressed me out b/c i’m so nervous about going abroad. still, the rep was really nice and had a lot to say about the support system that ifsa offers american students when they’re studying internationally. she didn’t say anything about literal hand-holding, but it must be available, right?

finally, i got to race back across campus to lit, where i sat at the wobbly desk right in the draft from the door with wet socks for an hour and fifteen minutes. and the cute boy with all the manners who i have a crush on sat all the way across the room. oh, but the highlight of the day was that i passed him at some point during my campus travels, and he was carrying a portfolio. not only is he adorable and handsome, not too tall, and very polite, he’s an artist. well, at least he takes an art class. or knows someone who does. but even if he was just carrying a friend’s case, how chivalrous is that? pretty chivalrous.

work work work. i finished one concert report for jazz this afternoon, and i’m just going to leave the last one until next week. i’m searching for articles to use for my psych paper, but the new york times hasn’t printed anything on the metrosexual recently (we’re on the genes, culture and gender chapter). but i’ll find something, and i’ll write that for friday and get it out of the way so i’ll have plenty of time to study for jazz tomorrow. just how i wanted to spend my wednesday, really.

quote of the day: “dance with me, b/c if you gots the poison, i’ve gots the remedy” – jason mraz

love always, em locke

i’m always impressed with the moon when it’s full on a really clear night, especially up here where there’s hardly any light pollution and the air is so much cleaner. but last night i just couldn’t stop looking at it and pointing at it and trying to get other people to be interested, too. so imagine my confusion when i looked at the sky after dinner and half the moon was shadowed! somebody warn me next time there’s a lunar eclipse. well, once i got over the initial shock, the eclipse was cool.

the next celestial natural spectacle on my witness list are the northern lights. they’re rare this far south, but it’s possible to see them every once in awhile. a few weeks ago, my lit & environment professor e-mailed us and told us to watch the skies, but i forgot and i don’t know if there were actually any sightings. ah, the wonders of central upstate new york. now that i think about it, there is the potential for some pretty diverse geographical experiences over the next year or so: from ny state out to the washington coast and across the atlantic to europe.

quote of the day: “i just want to be wonderful.” – marilyn monroe

love always, em locke