emlocke

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  • Reasons why I’m glad my roommate is home

    • fresh, objective material to use for justifying the frivolous purchase I made over the weekend
    • she can take pictures of me in the frivolous purchase I made over the weekend so I can send them to my mother
    • I don’t have to face up to the fact that I’m the only one who’s been drinking gallons of Diet Coke when I see all the cans in the recycling bin
    • someone to call out, “it’s on!” when Jon and Kate Plus Eight comes back from commercial
    • she’s not too scared to go tell the super that all the lightbulbs in our hallway are burned out
    • she missed me while she was away, too!

    This is what I’ve been listening to this week (when I’ve turned off TLC)
    Te Busque (Spanish version) by Nelly Furtado
    Crushcrushcrush by Paramore
    Spring Street by Dar Williams
    Blue Skies by Blackpool Lights
    Te Busque (Spanish version) by Nelly Furtado (again)

  • I’m crying small, sticky tears as I write

    Introduction to Creative Writing met at one o’clock on Wednesdays.  I took a violet spiral-bound notebook to class.  On a lavender post-it that I stuck to the inside of the back cover, I wrote:

    “. . . Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”—D. Foster Wallace

    The only work that I have ever read by David Foster Wallace is the commencement speech in which he said those words.  The line was preceded by the following:

    “As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head . . .”

    That’s what depression is like.  A constant, hypnotic monologue damning each pleasure, every hope, any purpose and all courage.  It corrodes human resolve.  It bleeds out energy.  It’s paralyzing.  It will confine you to the inside of your own head and the only way out is to take back control over how and what you think. 

    It scared me that the Creative Writing course was one of the things that triggered such despair.  The possibility that deliberate writing, and the introspection and vulnerability that accompanies it, might always be so damaging was depressing enough.  I didn’t want it to be that way.  I really wanted to believe that, armed with philosophies like Wallace’s, I could cope my way past all the classic hazards of sensitivity, perception, and creativity, and get better.

    To this day, I’ve never read a word by David Foster Wallace that wasn’t in his commencement speech.  At first, I abstained out of fear.  My depression was an imaginative and particularly superstitious monster.  I believed that reading Infinite Jest or Consider the Lobster would bring me closer to the author, but I also believed that if I got too close, I would break the spell.  I might threaten his control over his own thoughts.  And I might shatter any hopes I had for myself.

    I’ve still not become a reader of David Foster Wallace’s work, and now I only wish there were some validity to my irrational fear.

    The speech is archived at Marginalia.org.

    I still have the post-it.

  • The illumination of a city

    From my rooftop, 9PM September 11, 2008

  • This is what we talk about when we go out for Italian

    “You never called spaghetti ‘pasgetti’ when you were little?”

    “No.”

    “What did you call it?”

    “I called it ‘spaghetti.’”

    I also pronounced “available” with a Y until I was nine, put “Please Do Not Disturv” signs on my bedroom door, and thought an emergency vehicle that drives people to the hospital was called an “amblee-ance,” but I left all that out.  It’s not lying by omission if he doesn’t ask, right?

    This is what I’ve been listening to this week:
    Naked Eye by Luscious Jackson
    Time by Sarah McLachlan
    Live Your Life by T.I.
    Just Like Heaven by The Cure
    We Looked Like Giants by Death Cab for Cutie

  • Shooting up a love flare

    My mom has this thing that she says: “Love your guts.”

    It’s the verbal expression of those moments when emphatic love flares up so brightly that you want to force someone between your ribs and squeeze them into your chest cavity to get them just that much closer to your beating heart.

    It sounds a little gory, maybe even a little morbid.  But isn’t that just like love?

  • A fifth-grader ago

    Remember when Puffy or whatever he used to go by and Sting performed “I’ll Be Missing You” at the MTV Video Music Awards?  What was that, like ten years ago?

    More like eleven.

    And now it looks like all the nominees for Best New Artist might be younger than I am.

    At least that makes me too old to get caught up in a battle over promise rings.

    This is what I did yesterday afternoon while it rained and rained and rained and rained:

  • I won’t put on tomorrow’s bra before I get in bed tonight.

    Highly Notable Events in August 2008

    • Browsed wedding dress possibilities with my dearest friend Jill (her dress, not mine)
    • Tuned in to coverage of the Democratic National Convention
    • Tried a new Thai restaurant in Park Slope before my roommate did
    • Acknowledged my compulsive need to be “the favorite”
    • Visited Camp Jewell for the first time in almost five years

    I started this blog five years ago today by summarizing the highly notable events of Summer 2003.  For two weeks, I coded every entry in Notepad and loaded them page by page to my web space on the school server.  Then my HP laptop crashed (surprise.) and I started posting to Blogger.  Google had just acquired Blogger, and as an early-ish adopter, I was one of the first ‘citizens’ from outside the Googlesphere to receive a Gmail invitation.  I’ll keep boasting about that even though I switched to WordPress in February 2006; and, nobody cares when I was invited to Gmail.

    September.  It was the time of year when new pens still smelled new and I had all kinds of plans for a school year more productive, accomplished, and fulfilling than the last.  Before my notebooks got dogeared and my penmanship got sloppy.  Before a leaky highlighter in the bottom of my bag bled through half of Tuesday, and Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday on every single page of my planner.

    I used to resent this time of year in this sort of subterranean way, veiled by typical complaints about the end of the summer and by the goody-two-shoes excitement to go Back to School.  In my unseen heart, I considered it a mean trick. I wondered if the summer off was worth the consequence.  It was a false start—a new year in September?  It promised all these new chances and beginnings, but nothing seemed to change.

    I remember staying up later than I’d ever stayed up on a school night before my first day of fourth grade.  I was organizing my closet.  Sorting troll dolls and amateur pottery.  I cleaned my room like it had never been cleaned before.  I thought if it looked like a Pottery Barn catalog (or like the set of Full House) when I woke up on The First Day of School, it would stay that way all year.

    In the days right before the seventh grade, I dropped hints to my mom that I wanted my first real bra because the narrow straps on my First Day of School dress would expose the sports bras I usually wore.  I also refused to kneel on the carpet, which is how I usually watched TV or worked on craft projects, because The Dress revealed my knees and I didn’t want them to look chafed.

    Every night for three weeks before my senior year in college, I sneaked out of the house and drove into town to walk the length of Main Street and loops around the Middle School for an hour or more, sometimes into the next morning.  Ever since, I’m tempted to go for a long walk when I can’t sleep.  I’ve tried to think of a safe place to go in the middle of the night.  At home, my biggest concerns were distrustful cops and groups of stoned teenagers.  In New York, I have to wait until the gym opens at five if I need to outrun insomnia.  I’ve done it before.

    Outrunning—that’s what it’s always been.  And when I tried to dodge bad habits, quick fix damage, or elude depression, they always caught up with me.  They’ve chased me down.  I decided to expunge ten years of slobbery on the night before fourth grade?  Perfect timing.  I had really started to believe that life worked that way; that time was defined either from one day to the next or over the span of three seasons, and never in between.  Time dropped paperweights and bookends in the same spots every year until graduation.

    Since my days of First Days of School, I’ve been more free to take each day as it comes.  To take.  Each day, individually.  For what it is.  As it comes.  Not before.  Nor after.  One at a time.  In chronological order.  I know it sounds indifferent, like how you live when you’re just getting by.  But, honestly?  I would rather get through every day without walking all night just to get to it.

  • What I spend money on when I spend too much money

    August has been full of good excuses for shopping.  Incentive gift card for filling out a heathcare survey at work, an unexpected gift, labor day sales and a little freelance cash all went toward these purchases.

    1.  My two-year-old Macbook is about as pristine as it could be after all the hours I’ve logged on it.  I regularly cleanse with compressed air and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, but I just bought the Incase Hardshell to protect the glossy exterior.  The case is softly frosted, so it changes the whole look of the laptop, and it has a very touchable rubberized coating.  Externals snap perfectly into the laser-cut outlets.  I can’t believe I waited so long to get one of these.  Comes in pink, plum, red, blue, black, and frosted white for Macbooks of all sizes.  $50 at the Apple Store.

    2.  The retractable blush brush at Sephora open and closes smoothly and it’s built for travel.  It’s also the first blush brush I’ve ever owned that didn’t come free-with-purchase.  $20 at Sephora.

    3.  We finally, finally retired the Times Square photo poster that’s been hanging above our futon for a year and a half and replaced it with this ready-to-hang wrapped canvas print.  I love it.  The image is a magnified, sepia-toned photograph from beneath a leafy canopy.  At first, I wished some green accents had been preserved, but there’s a lot of depth in the image.  I tend to like artwork and patterns based on motifs and sort of nebulous themes instead of one focal object, and this one makes a much better impact than Times Square did.  $70 at Ikea.  Oh, and if anybody needs a tacky poster of Times Square, please let me know.  I have this random one just lying around.

    4.  The kitchen is also getting some much needed attention.  I’ve had my eye on these sweet rebus-inspired screenprint posters for a few months, and the designer, BluLima, lured me in with this romantic, minty ink color (eco-friendly water-based ink, at that!).  I love.  Also in two shades of pink.  $12 (plus shipping) at BluLima’s Etsy shop.

    5.  My bank statements and student loan account info are still in an unsorted pile laced with Dunkin’ Donuts receipts, but now the pile is inside one of these letter-sized Stockholm storage boxes instead of shuffling across my desk.  Available in graphite, red, orange, brown, and white.  $10 each at The Container Store.

  • Emily is Twittering . . . until she gets distracted.

    I’ve added a new link category to help you find me elsewhere on the web, including my Flickr photostream and Sugar, Sugar, the tumblelog I started tumbling (this is so embarrassing) while on vacation at the beach last month. It rained every morning, and if it didn’t rain in the morning, it rained in the afternoon. I had a lot of quiet time and I spent some of it adding a new layer to my mixed media web presence.

    Using Tumblr is like pasting together a string book of newspaper clippings on a theme. In the 10th grade, my string book was themed: “Typos and Misprints.” It required more close-reading of the local papers than has probably ever been done by someone outside of the press offices. My tumbling theme is “For the sweet life.” I’m posting images, quotes, videos and links that I’m sweet on.

    I’ve also linked to myself on Twitter. Can someone tell me why this tool isn’t called twittr? Because even if you appreciate that ‘e’ you know that neologically, it doesn’t belong there. There are days when I feel like my brain is on Twitter—thoughts come in a choppy stream of 140-character phrases. I don’t know if I’ll translate that to the web very well, but I’ll register for any site where I can customize my own page.

    Twitter would be more fun if I were also a texter. I’m guessing that all the people from whom I’ve refused text messages are going to be mad when an online gadget is what finally sways me to subscribe to a texting plan.

    Relax, I’m not going there yet.


    Sarajo Frieden via ffffound.

    This is what I’m listening to this week:
    Circle by Paramore
    The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel
    Out Loud by Dispatch
    Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry
    Come Back Home by Lisa Loeb

  • Call me when “Love Story” starts

    There is a new high-definition TV in the apartment directly across the street from mine. I can see the hundreds of thousands of pixels from my bedroom. From my bed.

    I watched more Olympic events on that television than on my own. From across the street, it was easy to see aerial shots of the pool. When country names and flags were super-imposed over the top three lanes, I could even make out the one that said USA. The display on this TV set is bright. I wonder how big the screen is.

    Last night, I watched Michelle Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention. I couldn’t hear a word, but visually, it was an interesting perspective. I could see her smile. I could see “One Nation” banners fluttering in the audience. I could see the crowd respond to Michelle at specific moments. I could see her daughters come out on the stage followed by their father, via satellite. When the woman who lives in the apartment got up and walked past the TV, I automatically dodged her moving silhouette as if she were blocking my view at a live event.

    Right now, the cameras are focused on Bill Clinton in the audience. Is it just me, or are his ears very red?

    I think of the HD-woman as Bea. All last summer, I saw her sit with her elbows up on the windowsill, looking down at the street. As it got warmer out this spring, I anticipated the day she would start to open her living room windows again, thinking that I would mark summer’s arrival that way.

    Now I’m marking bedtime by Bea’s television. If I glance across the street around 1AM and her apartment has gone dark, I know it’s definitely time for my lights out, too.