Family, hurray!!! April 22, 2008

This last weekend not only lived up to expectations. It crushed the living daylights out of them. Holy crap. I don’t know when I’ve ever had a better weekend. (And man, am I in a better mood now. Whew! Can you tell??)

Mary and Doug got here on Thursday, Rupert and Carol came in on Friday evening, Cathal showed up on Saturday afternoon, and yeah, it was pretty much nonstop eating, drinking, eating, drinking, taking in some sights (but not really) and then back to eating and drinking. I must say that I had a stroke of absolute inspiration and took Mary and Dough to a bar IN La Boqueria for lunch the day they got here, right after we threw back a quick pint of Guinness at Flaherty’s. (The only drag about that, and then subsequently the whole weekend, was that they learned that my 7-year-old cousin was in the hospital after having the first asthma attack of his life so far. How’s that for timing? Poor little dude! But no worries! He’s fine now!!) Anyway, trauma aside, they were sufficiently pleased with the Boqueria, and the meal was, in Doug’s terms, just ridiculous (fried artichoke hearts, jamon, chipirones, sardinas a la plancha, asparagus, grilled wild mushrooms, gambas al ajillo, etc — get excited, Becky, Ben, Sean, Laura, Kim and Martijn, because we’re SO going back when you come here!!). It was the beginning of a series of absolutely INSANE meals that we had, including the major highlight of the weekend, dinner at Commerc 24. The chef there apparently trained with el Bulli himself, and yeah, it was pretty much the tastiest meal I’ve ever had. (FOUR hours of nonstop eating waves of delicious tapas and drinking crazy-good wine and conversing, during which the bulk of the conversation went something like “oh my GOD that’s good…” “I know, have you tried the other one yet? just wait!”)

But you know what? All that delicious food and partying isn’t really even the best part. (Although, seriously, it was all totally spectacular. Hyperbole aside, I swear!) The best part was how much I enjoyed having my family here, as well as some of their best friends. What an amazing group of people. I think not altogether infrequently about how lucky I am to have been born into such an excellent family (on both sides!), and also how I seem to have been happily condemned to a life full of scores of wonderful friends, but it’s not often that I think about how awesome the friends of my family are. (Because, honestly, how often does that come up?) And I was sitting with them all at dinner on Saturday — Mary and Doug, Rupert and Carol, Cathal (who couldn’t bring his wife and baby, unfortunately, but apparently his wife was a relatively well-known punk-rock screamer in Zurich in the 80s–um, how cool is that??) — and it occurred to me, holy shit, these people are who I HOPE to be in 20-odd years. They are successful. They are cool. They are smart and knowledgeable and interesting, and share their interests with their cool, smart, knowledgeable and interesting kids. They take cool vacations. They read good books and see good movies. They’re all still damn attractive. They have cool friends who they fly to Barcelona for the weekend to see. They, in short, are kicking ass at being grown-ups. So of course, at said dinner, I might have made something of a speech (when Mary asked us all to go around and say what we’re excited about in our lives right now) and said to them that, for the love of Buddha, I hope you guys know just how damn cool and inspirational you are! Because I doubt, in the course of their insanely busy everyday lives, they often zoom out and think, hell ya, this is the life I created, and shit, isn’t it f***ing cool? To me, that’s just damn exciting.

All this to say, the weekend was incredible and provided quite a bit of the perspective I’ve been so effing desperate for lately. (Holy crap, have I been “cambiante” lately. Ooof, it’s exhausting to be so freaking all over the place!) Mary is always such a calming, reassuring, relentlessly positive and infinitely loving presence, and Doug does a great job of reminding me that stuff just doesn’t have to be a big deal. Plus, everything in life looks better over a delicious bottle of cava. Also: somehow, over the course of the weekend, I was nearly totally talked out of my interest in HR (at least, working in an HR department at a company, ugh…) and my interest in Africa was sparked all over again (totally Rupert, Carol and Cathal’s fault — a collective “why the hell wouldn’t you go to Africa??” sentiment was pretty much all I needed to tip the scale back toward Cape Town…). So there may be developments on that front, still — I’ll keep y’all posted, promise.

Of course, in a lot of ways, I’m even more confused than ever (what DOES it all mean???), but at least I had a kickass weekend with some of the bestest folks on the planet, and for a minute, I got to stop feeling dumb and incompetent, which feels freaking great.