The 'Bring Your Own Mom' Business Trip

Travelling for work is annoying because it means you don't get to go home to your personal life at the end of the day.  OK, it can break up the monotony of your usual office routine, and you might get to see a few new cities, but it tips the delicate work-life balance in entirely the wrong direction.  As a frequent business traveller, I have often thought how great it would be if I could bring along a loved one in order to counter-balance this.  It's tough to invite my boyfriend or my friends along, because they have jobs of their own to attend to, and are strangely reluctant to take time off in order to wait around all day for me to finish work so that we can hit the town.  Luckily for me, I do have one such faithful companion, which lead me to an interesting idea:  The Bring Your Own Mom Business Trip!

The best business trip breakfast companion- My mother.

I know this might seem inappropriate.  What's she going to do all day while you are in back to back meetings?  Won't you feel guilty in the evening if you have to take a client for a drink?  What if she hangs around the hotel lobby introducing herself to your colleagues (awkward)?  Admittedly, this works best when your business destination city has more to offer than a sheet metal factory tour and the hotel bar of the local Radisson.  It is necessary to exercise some discretion here.  Fortunately, my business trip last week took me to Paris, the ideal BYOM work destination.

Work travel means corporate rates and free upgrades, so you can treat your mother to some well deserved luxury to make up for all those times you behaved like a mental person when you were younger (or last week).   There are many luxurious hotels in interesting cities that will do the trick, but you really can't go wrong with the Four Seasons George V in Paris.  Here are some reasons why:

• Mothers appreciate fluffy towels more than the average human, and this is what your bathroom/ vanity area looks like:

• Louis XIV antiques are to your mother what the X Box and Lay Z Boy are your boyfriend:

• While Paris with your friends is more about the clubs and the night life, with your mother you will appreciate all Paris has to offer by day, providing essential nourishment for the culturally anorexic:

Strange balloon man hanging out the window of the Louvre

Montmartre

I highly recommend the BYOM business trip.  Work trips and bonding with your mom don't seem like an obvious combination, and yet this works on many levels.  She will be so flattered you invited her along, she'll feel like she is sharing a part of your life that is usually kept entirely separate from her, and she's waaaaaay better company than Dan from Accounting.

Looking Back on 2011

Happy New Year!  Here are my fondest memories of 2011:

• Maroma Margaritas on the beach in Tulum, Mexico
• Lazy Sundays spent in Notting Hill street cafes, squeezing in tighter around the table as friends wander by and pull up a chair
• The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk.  Karoo, by Steve Tesich.  The weekly Modern Love column in the New York Times.
• Morning runs in Hyde Park followed by frothy cappuccinos and fruit from the market stalls on the way home
• Dancing all over London, racing dawn in 4 inch heels
• Limen at the Royal Opera House, then dinner at The Ivy, avec maman
• London Freize week parties
• Gypsy Kings in the piazzetta of Portofino
• Late night transatlantic Skype conversations with my siblings
• Summer days in Pilion, trying to dock my little boat in its impossibly awkward mooring in a little port in a little fishing village in a little peninsula that is my paradise.

I am certain that I have left out many many glorious moments, but a pattern has begun to emerge that illustrates my motivation to create this blog:  All these experiences and objects are peripheral to my every day life, they do not form its core.   The core is what I studied for, sacrificed summers to internships over, and subjected myself to rigorous examinations and interviews to achieve.  Its the subject of the majority of conversations I have with my father.  It is what 50% of the clothes in my wardrobe are appropriate for, and the only reason that I own sensible shoes.  It is what I wake up early for, and what consumes the most significant number of hours of my day.

And yet, when I look back on 2011, the core becomes irrelevant.  My real life, the actual me, is in the halo that surrounds the core, made up of hundreds of particles of my suspended weightless joy, revolving around the central mass, like the rings of the planet Saturn.

My true passion lies not in my day to day routine of work, but in my free time, in the life that my work facilitates.  What bothers me is that the meaningless mass of my life is so well documented.  I have 100s of emails, files, receipts and folders detailing each interaction and event of my work.  Who cares?  What I really want to remember is the halo.  Hence this blog:  My exploits, thoughts, tastes, trips, experiences, and adventures that are the real me.  Voila!