locEmotion: location + emotion

Locative SMS writing exercise:

The class finds a location at UTS where something meaningful happened to them, a site resonant with traces of their own emotion, or experience. They return to their own special location at 12.45pm on Tuesday October 18, recording the place, what they are seeing, what they were feeling when the experience occurred.

Thanks to someone in the class for using the word "locEmotion". I've shamelessly plundered it as the title for this exercise!! Most people came in anonymously so I've stuck with that for now... here they all are... the traces of your location: emotions.

xxxx6752: Female toilets on level 5 building one. A girl in the cubicle next to mine tries to purge as quietly as possible. It makes me sad to think that most people sit on toilets to get rid of waste, while others spend hours in here after meals to throw up.

xxxx8915: I'm standing at the first set of escalators in building two. This is where i saw a man humiliated by his friends. As he stood on the moving stairs, they pushed him. He became trapped between the unmoving rail and the moving rail. I remember feeling horrified that they had pushed him, then laughed.

xxxx6405: I'm in rm 432. Bon Marche. I'm looking at the table and thinking of how my great grandmother's spirit is no longer here on earth. But her memory lives on.

xxxx6994: I'm at university hall. It is quiet and smells of carpet cleaner. I'm looking at the doors of the lecture theatre - empty. I remember the soft nervousness of my first lecture. Everything seemed weighed down with anticipation.

xxxx4785: Toilet CB 3.3 starkwhite porcelain + regimental blue cubicle, i recall 2 hrs of misery, spewing and crying, i heard claps and laughs as i missed my sis' map screening.

xxxx9805: come on baby, do the locEmotion with me:
in the loft looking at cheap coffee stained suede.

i've always felt lost in groups and you'd think a cafe would allow me the solitude a young poet thrives on. it seems i'm not the only one who sees the connection between coffee and writing. all of last year was spent being interrupted midthought, yet every spare moment i returned. perhaps location is a drug? atmosphere counts for a lot these days.

xxxx2260: I'm outside the entrance 2 the Great Hall in the tower blding. Be4 semester started i had 2 meet here 4 intn'l student orientation. I remember feeling excited 2 meet new friends and also slightly nervous what people thougth abt americans. More than anything though, i was stoked i finally made it 2 Australia.

xxxx3039: Sitting at my desk in the international office UTS, where i work, and if i wasn't looking at my phone i'd be looing at my computer remembering the day steve who works here was walking down the hall throwing an orange up and down and he threw it up too high and it hit the light fitting and smashed it out. Gave me a fright and a laugh.

xxxx9902: I’ve been here such a long time the place is thick with memories. It’s hard to isolate just one… Walking around I try to catch glimpses …when I first started teaching it was in the dread Tower, on floors 16 and 17, windows forever locked. Offices like high cells, terrifying late at night. Other jumbled up snatches… pushing my daughter in a pram, or carrying her as a baby down endless stairs in the Tower to the child care centre, now demolished… walking corridors with a huge pregnant belly… or the traces of a lover’s embrace, very late…

One of the most vivid was in my first year of teaching, first week of semester. A rowdy class, me young and nervous. An old friend happened upon the classroom, he had tracked me down to deliver terrible news - one of our best friends had died in a car crash overseas. I had to continue the class, wait until 9pm, and then make the phone calls, endless phone calls from a tiny office hidden on level 4. The funeral was the next day, and I had to call everyone, all of our friends, the same awful news, over and over, till around 11.30, when I dragged myself home to an anguished, sleepless bed.

xxxx4196: Since i stupidly forgot my phone today, and had no credit anyway, i am sending this message now. Clearly it is way past 12.45, but its ok, i think i only runied the experiemnt slightly. Using my amazing survival skills, i tracked down a public phone and sent this to myself, which i now forward to you:

Well i forgot my phone. At phone box out the front of tower where there is nothing to see except the asian girl who just fell over being ignored by everyone on the street. The most vivid memory i have of this spot is from just a week ago, when i came to use the phone and a guy trying to sell the Big Issue from the wall out the front of UTS. he told me that UTS had refused to let hime sell on the grounds and the council had told hime to keep off the street. Since this was his designated selling block he had no choice but to be on the wall. He sold two copies in six hours...

xxxx8089: Corner of 4th floor architecture building / humming plastic playbunny look but no touch organs on tile / he said i reminded him of the pretty girls in europe in the 1950s / its yr eyes he said kissing me on both cheeks / he talks in his own language thinking i can understand / moths without dust, particles of white, wanting to be back there with myself, where we both know me.