I think my weekend was pretty good; I did absolutely fuck all on friday night, which was necessary since I’ve been overstretching myself a little (some might say a lot) over the last few weeks. Work has been a little hectic, an ever decreasing amount of (will to) sleep, and if you sprinkle in a few visitors and you’ve got yourself a Cocktail deMotivation! (Pretentious French accent required.) So I spent some time gaming and vegging out. I have to admit that I’m looking forward to getting back to some semblance of rhythm. I haven’t seen a regular training schedule for a while now, and my lack of discipline to set one up and stick to it sickens me. Everyone I talk to excuses my lack of motivation and says it’s normal, but I can’t help but feel like I’m failing myself. I’ve been obsessively doing push-ups for the last few weeks and I do about 100 to 200 a day, whenever I find a free moment. I hate push-ups, and I do them as punishment. :)
Saturday I hung out with Marco, Clarissa and Holland at my mother’s. The weather was nice so we were all out in the backyard enjoying the sun, eating fruit, talking and playing with the baby. Man, that kid gets a lot of attention. She’s going to be a little heartbreaker when she grows up. I spent quite a bit of time wrestling with her and with a bit of luck she’s going to be a top-notch submission fighter when she grows up!
The goodbye between Marco and my mother was really quite painful. He was flying home the next day, and nothing short of a miracle will make that the last time they will ever see each other. When the taxi arrived to take us to the restaurant we were going to meet his brother and sister-in-law at, it was just heartbreaking to see my mother stand at the door of the house until we were out of sight and Marco constantly turning around to take one last look at her. Even now, as I write this, two days later, I get a little choked up thinking about it.
When we arrived at the restaurant, we thought the place was on fire because a large group of people was exiting the building. There was a firetruck out in front, but that turned out to be just a coincidence. Confident in the knowledge that it wasn’t a evac, I hopped out the car to check the availability of tables. The Maitre D’, who I’ve gotten to know a bit, told me that he was booked full, but that for me he’d find me a table. I asked him what that large group of people were doing here, and he said he’d had a 90 person dinner party who were just leaving, just in time for the 35 people dinner party to walk in. We got the table and were a little appalled when the dinner party walked in and turned out to have their congregation right next to us. We were hoping to avoid cigarette smoke, for the baby’s sake, but also because Clarissa is allergic to it. We tried to switch tables, but that wasn’t possible. By the time Paolo, Marco’s brother, arrived with his wife, Marco was so uptight about his daughter staying out of cigarette smoke that Paolo decided to bring Holland back home, since she was doing nothing but sleeping anyway. Fifteen minutes later Clarissa and Paolo were back and Marco was feeling a lot better and was able to enjoy himself a bit.
We had nice conversations, pretty good food and sub-par service (probably because the dinner party required so much attention.) Paolo is a big shot exec living in Lithuania right now (security details and private jets, etc.) who has worked and lived in several countries and thus has a lot of international experience. He was explaining how he had to fire some people recently and how that was never fun. That turned into a conversations about cultures, Marco prosthelizing about American business culture while Paolo tried explaining how there’s no right and wrong culture, and that the end result is much more important than the way you get there (within reason.) He said that you can’t use one culture’s values and apply them to another, and that you’ll never get the desired end result if you do. He explained it by asking me if I knew the Dutch, German or French word for “management.” I couldn’t think of it, and he said that it was because “management” is an American term, developed early last century and that it was a concept that had been exported over the world. All books teaching you management are written by Americans. The problem with that is that America has an individualistic country, with values that favour individualism. Most of the rest of the world, especially in Europe, there is a culture of collectivism, which leads to things like Socialism, which in turns leads to a complete breakdown of a lot of management strategies when you try to apply them by the book. I am not doing Paolo’s explanation much justice, but let me just tell you that his intelligence came shining through in the way he explained such a simple little fact, and it also showed his flexibility in cultural interchange. It was even more fun to see Marco throw a shitfit when Paolo and I started talking about World of Warcraft. :)
After dinner we grabbed a quick drink in a local bar that Paolo used to hang out at when he stilled lived in the Netherlands. I don’t know what it is, but Marco and I always have the most intense and intimate conversations at the eleventh hour. The last time I was in Texas it was exactly the same. He told me some things I needed to hear, and offered me a heap of reassurance. For some reason I trust him and take his advice to heart, after I apply the necessary index-corrections, of course. It’s Marco I’m talking to after all. The goodbye was rather emotional, too, but I had to get back to my mother’s because I had an important thing to take care of that evening.
Last sunday morning, at 2:10am, it was exactly a year since my father passed away. My sister and I found it the approriate time to scatter his ashes. He wanted to be scattered in the park in Hoorn, where my father spent many nights sleeping under the stars in his hippy-days, he and my mother spent many days during the time they got to know each other, we spent many summer days swimming and barbequing. My father used to tell us a lot of stuff we already knew, but we induldged him anyway and patiently waited for him to be done, that way he felt like he was contributing something to our education. Before he died, he was explaining to us that ashes can’t be scattered anywhere. There are designated places where you can do that, or you have to get permission from the landowner. My father’s last defiant act was to ask us to not ask for permission and to sneak into the park and do it at night. Fortunately, he died in the early morning hours, so that was no problem. We stumbled around the park in the pitch dark, avoiding the drunk neo-hippies and finding our spot. We spent some time talking about our father, our regrets and about how we loved him and when the time came, we slipped his favourite bottle of beer in between the rocks at the water, just like he used to do to keep the drinks cool while we spent the day there, and we scattered his ashes on the field where he spent so much time with my mother, as well as near the water. Think of any comedy movie you’ve seen where ashes were scattered (The Big Lebowski for instance) and you’ll realise that my sister and I experienced a little bit of hilarity. Then we cried a whole bunch. In the end it was a very satisfying, fun and awful experience. I was left very emotional the last few days, and it feels like I’ve regressed. I’m dreading the death of my mother and the impact it will have on me. She was a much more important and intricate part of my life than my father was and I’m not sure how I’m going to handle myself when I already have moments when I don’t know where to put my grief for my father.
Sunday I woke up early and spent some time chatting with my mother. When I got back to Amsterdam Moulsari took me to see an installation at the Stedelijk Museum which was really interesting. Random pieces of art were lined up, some lights were put behind it and the shadows it created were used as a basis for some really cool grafitti art. After that I was exhausted so the rest of the day was spent chillin’ like a villain.
