Moved!

Hi – I’ve moved to http://countessdiaries.tumblr.com/ because of the cool templates that allow me to post all the things I fancy, from music, to quotes to photos…should be called the schizo blog. Check it out. Please.

Shameless fundraising (or early bday present)

By now, many of you know that I’m working in communications for an NGO called Kanpe, based here in Montreal. And you also know the challenges that Haiti is facing following the earthquake on January 12th, 2010. In my case, it took an earthquake to make me pay attention, because most of Haiti’s problems have been going on for generations. And now cholera. It’s practically biblical. What next? A plague of locusts?

I joined Kanpe because I’ve been trying to find a way to help, beyond frowning at headlines and watching Sean Penn shout at the world.

I give my time because I respect the founder (Dominique Anglade) immensely: her focus and devotion to finding long-term solutions for Haiti are only equaled by the grief she’s endured since she lost her parents in the earthquake.

The other reason is that Kanpe means «  to stand up » in Creole, and helping Haiti stand up again on it’s own is Kanpe’s goal. We’re allied with Partners in Health (founded by an incredible man named Paul Farmer, who would be a saint except he doesn’t have time) and Fonkozé (a micro-finance organization), both of whom serve and employ Haitians, and have done so for decades.

Our shared goal is to build communities of self-sustaining families who leave our program being financially independent, knowing that their kids are being educated, that their homes are strong and safe, that they have animals to bring up and live off, that they have access to healthcare, that they can manage their finances. We leave them to Kanpe: to stand on their own. We’ll start with families that are so impoverished that to reach the Western standards for poverty would be an improvement.

We’re trying to create a model that can be used by NGOs around the world – one that teaches that proverbial man to fish, instead of feeding him sushi he never ordered in the first place.

The last time Dominique was in Haiti, she met a mother whose little boy looked very plump and healthy, in contrast to all the other kids. Not because he drinks so much milk – the mother sells any milk they have to survive – but because she brings him up on Coca-cola.

I want those kinds of stories to disappear.

So yes, please donate to Kanpe. You’ll get a tax receipt, and my undying gratitude. Arcade Fire is matching every dollar we raise up to $1 million, so the faster we get there, the less I’ll be harassing you. And just in case you need more reasons to give: Arcade Fire does more than just promote Kanpe from up on stage, they also line up at Bureau en Gros to get documents photocopied because we need them for a presentation, and nobody else has time.

I’m grateful to be part of it. And if some of you have extra time on your hands, we have tons of work to do, right here in Montreal. Just contact me directly or check out kanpe.org

Here’s the link to donate:

http://www.canadahelps.org/GivingPages/GivingPage.aspx?gpID=9638

Here’s info on Partners in Health:

http://www.pih.org/

And it’s founder, Paul Farmer’s philosophy of care,  (read “Mountains Beyond Mountains” if you really want to be blown away):

http://twitter.com/share?text=Watching%20Paul%20Farmer:%20This%20I%20Believe&via=livestream&url=http%3A//livestre.am/Gtq

Fonkoze is the microfinance organization that will help us teach Haitians how to manage what they have:

http://www.fonkoze.org/

Of kleptomania & motherly love

I know I’ve written very happy blogs recently. And I read that people like people who are happy (another groundbreaking study, obviously), so by now you should like me – you should really, really like me.

No studies have been conducted on how people feel about people who are deeply annoyed – and I am. Consider yourselves my guinea pigs, and this wee rant my unofficial study.  Why?

My mother.

She’s unhinged. There, I said it. She is. After I moved out of the house many eons ago, she’d leave messages on my answering machine demanding that I return various items she’d decided I had stolen from her. Silver serving knives. Her cashmere sweater. Any one of her 120 Hermes scarves – all things that any 17 year old part-time pizza waitress would consider useful.

I used to get mad and call her back to screech my innocence, “Mum, you are insane!!!!! I.do.not.have.your.vintage.toilet.paper.stand. OK??”.

Then I realized that this was the only way she knew to stay in touch with me without admitting she missed me. So I decided to ignore the calls and eventually fled the province to attend university (where it occurred to me that one of her cashmere sweaters would have come in handy). She still accused me of stealing things when I’d come home to visit, but I was too busy daydreaming about the next UWO pub crawl for it to register.

It’s now 17 years later and I’m currently not speaking to my mother for reasons too complex to bore you with (except to say that I’m right, she’s wrong), so this morning I woke to find 2 emails from her demanding that I promptly return the three Hermes scarves I supposedly stole from her when I visited her in Vermont last May.

Her emails say that she won’t speak to me until I return the scarves – the ones I never took in the first place. (NB: this is a pic I took off the Web, not a pic of one of the “stolen” scarves).

She must miss me, she must really miss me.

My Family (and Other Things I Miss)

I’m home after a summer of C’s: California, cottage, Croatia.  I’m putting the pieces of my life back in order, layering my responsibilities back on like clothing, thinking about the next steps. Ugh. Bring on sleepless nights, existential angst, and making lists at 2am. Bring on coming home to find that my daughter’s schoolbooks for 1st grade had arrrived…and that I’d mistakenly ordered the books she’ll need in 4th Grade. Ugh.

It seems this last trip to Croatia was less about what I got out of it – family,  figs, sun and sea – than it was about what I didn’t.

No more living a deux: A. and I went from our little bubble of 2 to a big fat blissful one with 8 other adults and 3 kids…a holiday away from our “us-ness”.

No more dreaded “ings”: planning, scheduling and organizing. Instead – a gentle chaos. The kids were put to bed when they begged for it, or when they threw tantrums that made the little girl from Poltergeist seem Zen. We ate when we were hungry, played ferocious ping pong tournaments after too many glasses of wine, and somehow we each did our own thing, together.

I miss my family.

So this one’s for them: some of our silliest moments. Also the only place my brother Marcos can see a photo of himself jumping off a cliff and into the sea – my evil way of getting him to read my blog for the second time in his life. Hmmph.

The villa we rented was gorgeous…except for some of the artwork. Strange stuff (I hope the owner never finds this blog because I think he painted much of it). So I devised a project whereby each one of us would imitate their favourite warped painting. This is Marcos doing a very good job. Freaky.

This is Daisy imitating the painting in my bedroom. She could definitely be a model for Harlequin romance novels. I couldn’t get anyone else to pose. Snif.

My brothers Stefan and Marcos at their most expressive. This is the quietest they were at any point. Enjoy the silence.

Enough with silence: I like to make an entrance (almost as much as I like to annoy my brothers).

The T-shirt says it all: this is what a really cool grandpa looks like.

The men in my family are obviously emotionally mature. This is Stefan and Tor – his talented girlfriend who is on her way to becoming either the next Kate Winslet or fab singer, or both. No pressure Tor;)

I think the last time all my brothers and sisters were together was the last family wedding, over 6 yrs ago. We’re still missing Chloe here…but between us I think we reached a combined mental age of 12.

Kids should be seen and not heard…really?

I think there’s a gene in the family that forces us all to make ridiculous faces at the camera.

Love this. Do not get in the way of our ice cream.

My nephew Ben, whose future as either a rugby player, football player or large Polish farmer is already assured.

I like to set an example for my younger sister, and I get better at it after 2 bottles of scary Croatian wine.

This is my normally poised sister-in-law drinking champagne but missing her mouth completely.

This is Daisy moments after arm wrestling our Dad. Her hand strength is legendary within the family (and is regularly compared to that of a certain jungle-dwelling animal). I’m pretty sure she won.

And here is Marcos doing his own interpretation of Crouching Tiger, off a cliff…

…followed by Tor doing her best Bond girl imitation.

…followed by Stefan (no relatives were harmed during this shoot).

I love seeing my dad laugh like this. Makes the 4 flights, jet lag and insane mileage worth the effort.

Here’s to summer, to figs, to air travel, and to being lucky enough to be related to people I would adore even if we didn’t share some of the same genetic code.

Of Speedos and Minefields

My sister Daisy keeps saying that the Croatians are by far the luckiest Slavs of all. Instead of being surrounded by the usual Communist-era concrete blocks, they live in a primary-colored paradise of bright blue sea, blazing yellow sun, traffic-light red hibiscus and green cypresses.

Still, the traces of Eastern Europe remain, in the grumpy service at the cafes, or the woman who shouted horrid-sounding curses at me in Croatian when I took a photo of her selling her lace doilies – after it became apparent to her that I wouldn’t be purchasing any of them (see below).

Or in the complaints of the cafe owner we met yesterday at one of the beaches we stopped at during our boating expedition – his father left Croatia for Vancouver under the Communists, but he, the son, returned and opened what looked like a very successful restaurant on the beach, only to find that Croatia’s corruption would stop him in his profit-attempting tracks. A building permit should take 6mths to obtain – if you pay the 6000 euro bribe that has become standard. He didn’t, and has been waiting 5 years for his permit. “Next year, I leave this place”, he growled.

And lest we forget we are also in the Balkans: we are living up in the hills about 6km from the sea and even closer to the border of Montenegro. The hills above us are supposedly laden with minefields – well-signposted minefields, but minefields nonetheless. “Mama, am going for a walk in the minestreet!”, says my daughter. Ah, the Balkans.

Ok – enough with the deep-as-a-bruise analysis of Croatia. What I’m really getting at is that Croatia’s Easter European-ness is most apparent in its nasty swimwear. Teeny Speedos barely hanging on under massive bellies. Massive Speedos on small men wearing beige socks. Or worse, nudists perched on every craggy rock – and there are many. Are you ready?

This guy’s Speedo barely has anything to hang on to.

This man turned out to be…Polish. Oh joy. And turned redder and redder under our eyes.

Taken in a restaurant. Near food. Ack.

Um. Why bother with any Speedo at all?

Do I really need to explain my thoughts on this? Beige socks? Really?

Just be grateful that I lost the photo I had of one particularly naked man (taken with my huge zoom lens)…

Welcome to Villa Izvor darleenk.

I love this place. It was worth the 2 planes, 3 taxis, 3 airports and pulling a total of 4 suitcases across London with a jet-lagged 6 year old. I love the Med. I love the ups and downs of my family, who can have me on the verge of tears one day and laughing so hard the next day that I almost pee my pants. I love that last night’s dinner ended with my entire family squealing at my brother Marcos, because he has never once read my blog and claims never to have received the “password” to access it. Yes, this is my MBA, magna cum laude awarded brother we’re talking about. I love having a house so full of people that we get through 3 dishwasher loads per day, and 6 bottles of wine, 2 loaves of bread, and 3 tablets of chocolate per night. I love running along on a country road with my sister, being chased by a well-meaning but overly affectionate dog, under the eyes of identical-featured villagers who yell at us in Croatian as we go by.

I love that we love each other so well and so badly. But so consistently, no matter which way it goes – it’s always love, even if it means we recount the most embarrassing stories we can about each other, ad nauseam. It’s been 72 hours, and there are now 12 of us in this villa perched in the mountains about 6km from the seashore. The villa is luxurious and decorated a la Eastern Europe meets Northern California (with some seriously strange paintings thrown in – I’ll post some later), and we’ve almost all offended each other at least once – perhaps more for me.

It takes time to go from being an individual, living in your own country and in your own way, to living with 11 other people from a total of 3 countries. Our accents aren’t the only things that are different about us – so are our ways of coping with chaos, with yowling children, with someone leaping on you to hug you or to exclaim – as I did with my brother’s gorgeous girlfriend “oh! your body is SO different from the last time i saw you!!!”. Oh God.

I love crossing the street and picking bags full of figs, even if it means braving the terrifying German Shepherd who lives there. And I gladly wear the title of “Fig Pig” in the family. I love picking plums straight off the tree, rosemary from the bushes outside the front door, and more vegetables than I buy in a week, right here in the garden.

Including some very obscene zucchini.

Everything grows here, from pomegranates to peppercorns. I’d almost forgotten that my dream is to one day have a home in a place where I can have a fig tree, a lemon tree and jasmine bushes in my backyard. And while I’m at it, a sailboat to crisscross this amazing sea.

Over the Years and Into the Ditches

Today I am just over half my father’s age. And tonight my daughter and I fly to Croatia to celebrate his 70th birthday, along with my geographically scattered siblings, in a villa by the sea outside Dubrovnik. Tis a rough life (at least for my Visa card).

Most people bond with their fathers over sports, music or camping in the great outdoors. My father and I bonded over cars – accidents in them, to be exact. When my brother and I were growing up, my dad worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency and lived in the kinds of places that most people (and their insurers) avoid (can you guess where the pic below was taken?).

As I got older, re-building the intimacy between us every time I visited him required time and effort – except when we faced severe injury and/or death together. Over the years and into the ditches, I’ve found that our car accidents forced us into the kind of instant intimacy that can’t be achieved by say, sitting on the couch watching the Wimbledon finals.

We’ve flipped into a ditch near the Russian border in Communist Poland, driven over the edge of a cliff in India in a car my father rightfully calls an “unmanageable cross between an elephant and a lump of concrete” (the Ambassador), rammed into a ditch in the mountains outside Beirut, and even risked rolling off the side of a mountain in Cyprus – which was as stunning as it was narrow. Awesome bonding experiences, all of them.

Maybe I should add that he was not responsible for any of the above accidents…long stories, all of them.

You need the following ingredients to achieve this true instabond, because a fender bender just won’t cut it: a good flip, a strong skid, a trashed vehicle – all in a foreign country, preferably one where the language is completely unknown to either one of you. Once you’ve disentangled yourselves from the wreckage and ascertained that neither one is gravely injured, you both panic. Panic is a great equalizer and makes each one incredibly grateful to have the other, even if the other was at the wheel when it happened. It also erases any age difference between you, because you are forced to rely on each other to get help and to navigate the preferably wretched hospital you eventually find yourselves in.

The truth is that having lived what I consider to be the most terrifying experiences of my life with my father has led us into a relationship that’s full of opposites. On one hand, I’ve seen him at his weakest  at an age when many of my friends still hadn’t caught onto the fact that our parents were just…people…before our entrance into their lives demanded that they attempt – or at least fake – parental perfection. On the other hand,  having seen him in such shocking circumstances made me stronger, (bossier too if you listen to my siblings), and love him more fiercely than I can express. It also means I feel protective of him in a way that probably makes him want to light his hair on fire.

So yes, I feel very close to a father who lives half a world away and (almost) always has. But I have to admit that although he wasn’t responsible for our accidents, we hate driving together. I sit there and moan with fear, occasionally stomping my invisible brake, and he shouts at me not to make him nervous. It really ain’t pretty, and nobody wants to be in the car with us. But it’s emblematic of our relationship: we rage at each other and we adore each other, and only lately have we managed to edge closer to a calmer relationship, something more in between.

I’ll be taking a cab from the Dubrovnik airport to our villa by the way.

The Wishing Tree

Before I went to meet my friends for what turned into a tipsy afternoon of drinking us$55 pitchers of sangria at the Hudson, then into a night of boogying somewhere deep (and sweaty) in Brooklyn, I spent a lovely stolen afternoon at the MoMa in NYC. What decadence to spend an entire afternoon doing nothing more than….looking. From Picasso’s etchings, to an exhibit on Women in Photography, I spoiled my eyes and mind with beauty. Except for this thing, which is either a testament to the MoMa’s sense of humour or to just how drunk the curator was when she chose to include it:

It’s called Purple Obsession and is by a Japanese artist who regularly sews phallic symbols to everyday objects (as one does). In this case, a rowboat. According to the blurb on the wall, it “offers a wry documentary on the phallis as a symbol of virility and power.” Wry indeed;).

Into the museum garden I went, where I found a “wishing tree” put up by Yoko Ono.

Slightly cheesy concept, but it’s actually beautiful, and heavy with wishes, some of which brought me to tears. Check it out.

“I wish for the health of my family and for cancer to leave my mom forever”.

“I wish that I can speak with them all the times and forever.” I wonder who “them” is?

“Avoir des enfants avec Gilles, me marier et avoir la plus belle des vies” (“have children with Gilles, get married and have the most beautiful of lives”). Full sniffle.

That would make a nice change from meatballs falling from the sky.

Darn right.

Amen.

“I wish that I had one of my paintings was in a museum”.

“I hope that there is an afterlife so that I can see my love again who died last March”. At this point I put my sunglasses back on so that I could weep incognito. Whoever you are, I’ll make your prayer my own.

And just in case you need to laugh after that…check out the sign I spotted in Central Park. And no, I didn’t donate to his cause.

Where are the freaks, anyway?

Instead of 5 days away, I spent 10 days split between Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Connecticut and NYC. It’s such a luxury to fly by the seat of my American Airlines pants, even if I did have a mini panic attack on the last flight home, and had to restrain myself from grabbing the man sitting next to me. Still worth it. If I hadn’t extended my trip, I would have missed out on….

Venice beach, which was curiously devoid of freaks, to my great disappointment. I was there on a weekday, which means that even the Pierced, the Tattooed and the High have day jobs. Hmmm, does that make me the freak, wandering the beach on a weekday, with no schedule to follow other than my own?

I did meet Brett and Devon (not typical Cali names at all). We started talking after I burst out laughing because I overheard them talking about the “clubhouse” they were planning to build on the beach. Out of discarded palm fronds.  They’re look like they’re over 17, right?

- “Dude, we need a no girls allowed sign”.

- “Yeah, ok. And we need rules. And a punishment if they break the rules!”

- “Totally dude. But what are the rules?”

- “Dunno. Something gnarly. We’ll worry about that later – do you think we should let Brad into our club?”

Sometimes you meet people who are stereotypes on legs. Just as I was cackling to myself and feeling superior, I morphed into Canada’s very own stereotype when I apologized to the waitress while asking for extra napkins, “um, sorry but could I have some more napkins please?”. Devon teased me and my Canadian-ness through 3 tacos and a Corona, then bought me one.

Los Angeles: Paul lent me his Mini Cooper – even though I was basically a stranger, and one who had admitted to him the night before that I’ve been in 2 car accidents. What I forgot to tell him was that no, I wasn’t driving either time – and yes he still he trusted me to navigate the freeways of L.A. (although he called 30 seconds after I pulled out of the driveway, to make sure I’d taken the parking brake off). I pretended I wasn’t terrified and zoomed off to see Frank Gehry’s magnificent Disney Hall.

Worth it, don’t you think?

It’s incredible from all angles – organic flowing moving architecture plonked down in the middle of a big intersection that couldn’t be more urban. Frank rocks.

I’m sure Disney himself would agree that it’s supercalifragiliciousexpialidociously fabulous.

My Pilgrimage of the Pauls

I’ve now left one Paul to visit another. From Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, from one musician to another and from one friend to another. They both love what they do, they’re both generous, intelligent, irreverent, creative, and yes, pretty damn cute. I’m lucky to call them my friends. Seeing them choose to live creative lives reminds me to do the same.

It’s my Pilgrimage of the Pauls. Or as my grandmother says “mais c’est comme dans l’evangile, il y’en a combien de ces Pauls?”.

So I left Santa Barbara and what I now call Camp Merkelo, where relaxing is a scheduled event rather than a goal, and where Mr. Merkelo somehow became my (bossy but sweet) counselor and I became the (rebellious) teenager. I have proof: I decided to cycle to the beach one day, imagining my hair blowing in the wind in a doesn’t-Cali-like-totally-suit-me kind of way. It turned into an epic journey along major intersections, with my bike stuck in such low gear that – legs flying, bike barely moving, sweating profusely – I must have looked like I was in my own private spinning class. Never believe a man when he tells you to just “hop on the bike – the beach is around the corner”. What he means is: “I hope you survive that crappy thing that calls itself a bike, and make sure not to wear a semi-see through beach dress because not only will you cross multiple highways but you’ll get lost in a rough neighborhood, and may end up married to a taco vendor named Paco”.

Two hours later, I waddled through the door salty sweaty exhausted and definitely walking funny, to:  “Soph – we leave for dinner in 5”. And he meant it.

And yet. I hope to be invited back to Camp Merkelo next year, because if this trip didn’t solidify our friendship, then I don’t know what will.

Back down the Pacific Coast highway I went, where Paul (Hepker) picked me up at the airport. We met on Facebook.  We were (virtually) introduced by our mutual and fantastic friend Lindsay Eberts months ago – thank you Linds. Kudos to him for offering his hospitality to my navel-gazing, surf-attempting, Wonderland-living Barbie self.

“I’ll be the one in the Black Mini”, said his text.

“Car. Not skirt”, said the next one. I knew we’d get along well.

He composes music for movies like Tsotsi and Rendition, and for the Discovery Channel, among others. Which is why one room of his house looks like Mission Control for NASA. Check it out (www.paulhepker.com)

We had dinner at his neighbor’s house – funny, warm, cheeky people. It’s nice to be around people who enjoy being around each other. This was a family that loves to laugh – more often together than at each other (note to my family;).

Out came the L.A. Tales (I didn’t even have to beg that much): D. worked with some huge director who would likely have my nostrils sewn shut if I used his name, and J. used to be an actor. He was on one of my favourite shows, Lost, in season 2 – in one of the rare scenes I not only remember but actually understood (but no, even he couldn’t explain the ending to me).

Other stories include a huge star who shall not be named filming in Alabama two days after 9/11, and demanding that the airport be shut down and sealed off because he was convinced that his plane would be shot down by Al Quaeda. And shut it down they did. Take that, Al Quaeda.

How about the star who demanded that the arts department draw up the plans of the hotel he would be staying in during a film shoot so he could figure out how to get a suite adjacent to his own…for his pet?

Or filming in some U.S. city, only to find that one of the film producers didn’t trust the dry cleaners in the entire city to handle his…bed sheets. They had to be fedexed in and out of L.A., to a drycleaner he did trust.

I told you shallow was the new deep.