AnnMarie MacKinnon's Open Salon Blog

Emerging from Hiding Only to Go Promptly Back In

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:12:30 -0500

Whew!

It seemed like I was gone forever. And, I suppose in internet time, I was. It's now been a month since my return from holidays and I've been back to work and getting back to my normal routine, but my mind is anything but returned. It, I'm afraid, is still sitting on a Roman patio, drinking wine and enjoying fresh grilled porcinis.

But, I felt I should break the seal and get posting again, however short.

It's almost the holidays, and while I'm not quite in the Christmas spirit just yet (and may well not cross over into the jollies at all this year) I do have something to look forward to.

You see, what I'm really waiting for is that period after the holidays. A time of year I like to call "Inuary." The period in January when all us introverts, who've muddled through the work parties, family gatherings, and holiday soirees, now get to hide out with impunity. Everyone else is. While they're busy working on resolutions and trimming the fat--from both expenditures and holiday waistlines--we innies get a little peace and quiet.

I can finally sing "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and finally mean it.

Let Me Out... Let Me Be Gone!

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:10:03 -0400

Yesterday, as I walked down the sunny autumn street, headphones on, I realized I was smiling. I also realized I am never so happy, so expansively filled with magnanimity as I am just before I leave for a trip. It seems at those moments that it is what I am meant to be doing all the time.

And so, I leave this quick missive to let you know there will be photos and experiences to share on my return.

Ciao, friends!

Homecoming

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:09:34 -0400

They say you can't go home again, and until recently I believed them.

After all home, once you leave, is your past. You step out of it and change forever. You construct your own reality, build your life as you see fit, examine your values and set up your world according to the information and opinions you've collected. It's like pulling all the receipts you've crammed into your wallet out and sorting them, tossing the ones you don't need and filing the ones you do. It's just the natural order of things. After a while, that just becomes your normal. Home and the way it was still exists, but more as an impression rather than something real that takes place every day, even when you're not there. Home, no matter how much it changes while you're gone, still changes less than you yourself do.

Trying to go home again after that seems like an impossibility, or worse. For me for a long time it felt like an assault. I was comfortable with how I was living my life, how I'd grown and changed. But it was foreign to everyone else who remained behind when I left. I became foreign. People I'd known my whole life treated me as they always had, which of course didn't work, because I wasn't the same. So, every time I traveled the 6000 kilometers from my current home to the place where I grew up, I experienced intense feelings of dread beforehand and existential angst afterwards. I felt torn between the two places, like I was straddling a too-tall fence that only enabled me to have one foot on the ground at a time.

I am inexorably drawn to the east coast. In many ways it's who I am. Just as the land is carved out by the ocean, so have I been formed and molded by where I'm from. Cape Breton has its cliches, which pass for distinctiveness by many people's standards. It's the land of fiddles and kitchen parties, funny accents, fishing and mining, stunning vistas of the wild Atlantic juxtaposed against rolling farmland. And it's true that those things are part of what makes the island special. But not because they're unique Cape Breton. Other places have those things as well. But these things are signifiers of something else. They're picturesque stand-ins for the character of a resilient people making the best of hard times and bad weather, who blend stoicism with an irrepressible sense of humor, who believe no matter how things get, they're really not that bad. But underneath the warmth and charm has always run an undercurrent of ruin. Poverty. Pillaged natural resources. I'd often thought of Cape Breton as a sort of Marilyn Monroe figure--extremely beautiful, full of life and vibrancy, but also fragile, damaged, and exploited. With that comes a certain negativity. A willingness to continue on the same path, complicit in one's own failure to transcend what's been apparently prescribed by centuries of history.

I went to Cape Breton expecting my experience to be the same as it had been every other time I returned--I'd feel apart and oddly otherworldly. Disjointed. The connection wouldn't be there. I believed I'd return after the trip with that same divisive feeling I used to get, far ahead and yet somehow also left out. Unable to exist in two separate places--how I was before I left, and who I am now.But this time it was different. I've been working hard, and doing good work. The person I've become thus far, and who moves through her days determined to become more positive, more and deeply and thoroughly satisfied with who she is was able to look beyond patterns and the seemingly inescapable grasp of past habits and expressions and to shake off expectations simply by not participating in their reinforcement. I learned that it was possible to gently slip around them, so delicately that the movement almost goes unnoticed by anyone else, like water flowing around stones.

And that is the difference. Going home is not a monolithic act of returning to a discrete moment in time or to a physical location. It is the act of bringing all parts of yourself back to the familiar with the understanding that we are each water, swirling around one another for all time.

Well, i'm out of here...

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:08:06 -0400

I haven't been here much of late. Commenting, reading, sure. Almost every day. But as for actually contributing to the body of work, no. I just don't have it in me.

Because I've been too busy counting down the days to my vacation. And engaging in celebratory fist pumps...

pelvic thrusts...

and wild gyrations. Yeah, you heard me.

Gyrations.

Of the wild variety.

And so with one final thrust, I leave you with...

Wanted: Summer Reading Suggestions

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 19:08:10 -0400

Ever since I can remember, summer to me has meant barefooted days spent stretched out on a blanket reading. I'd get lost between the pages, traveling through imaginary worlds for entire days, preferring to keep my eyes cemented to the book during lunch than to break the spell for even the few moments it took to gulp down a PB & J.

When I started working summer and evening jobs, then went to university out of high school it started to change. I still read fiction for my English lit classes, and squeezed in a few pleasure reads where I could, but it wasn't the same. I'd pick up the book and get the little buzz I always did from starting a new story, but I'd get through a few pages before either feeling guilty for enjoying myself instead of studying, or just passed out from exhaustion. There was no more losing track of time making friends of new characters, weaving my way through serpentine plot lines, breathlessly reaching the climax of the narrative, enveloping myself in the afterglow of a freshly finished book. Instead, I read with purpose. Absorb. Retain. Dissect. Synthesize. Regurgitate. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Over the course of the past few months, though, I've come back to fiction. Certainly at nowhere near the pace with which I used to consume books (and I still pass out from end-of-day exhaustion after just a page or two), but a lot more than I have in recent years. Even though I write and edit for a living, I find that I still have the energy and desire at the end of the day to drift off into another world. Maybe it's the heat, the late sunlight, or maybe it's just that I'm calmer and ready to revisit the time in my life when I wasn't too busy to just venture off into new territory.

Now that I have a real summer vacation coming up, one that doesn't involve much travel and therefore too much sightseeing to squeeze into a what seems like a minuscule period of time, I'm excited about what books to dive into. I have two weeks of time to once again slip between the cool pages and visit someone else's mind for a while.

So, I'm taking suggestions. What's your desert island book? A must read that maybe I haven't heard of? Or the newest thing you've come across--a hot new author or title? Give me something strange, something precious, something funny or something sweet--or all of the above.