Ladies of leisure pick berries

As I've mentioned before, i have a very weighty responsibility as an unemployed to fill my time with the things that all of those who are currently employed would rather be doing. You think this is an easy task, do you? Well, watching television just doesn't cut it, no sirree, not with the employed friends I have. They would rather be taking trips and writing books and going to museums. And there are only so many hours to the day (oh you'd be surprised how these weeks are flying by!). Really, i don't know how people have time to work, when there are bike rides to be had, museums to visit, and berries to pick. But dear, friends, everything I do, i do it for you.


We took a little trip out to a farm in NJ with the Relief Society ladies last week to pick berries. The farm was so dreamy by this sleepy river and tiny little town with a cute antique shop.


I adore blueberries!!! YUM! Half of these made it into my bucket, and the other half into my belly. I had to try them all to make sure that they were ripe, right? NJ blueberries are different from he berries that i am accustomed to picking. As a kid, I would traipse in the woods in Finland collecting little blueberries from plants near the ground and they stained my fingers and teeth blue. These NJ blueberries were much larger, with a white center and grew on bushes. Upon further investigation, I came to discover that the berries that I've always picked and called blueberries were actually Bilberries, related to blueberries, but harder to cultivate and usually grown wild in sub-Arctic areas (that explains why they are in Finland). All these years, and I never had any idea. What else is there in my life that I've been completely mistaken about?

Well, with Trina and Kamilah (and Tess and Sarah), we still enjoyed picking these blueberries.

I brought home a whole bucket full!

And belly-full as well.


We also managed to find some of these. They weren't quite ripe yet. But I still managed to enjoy them :)


My phone/camera died in the middle of the day, so i didn't get any pictures of the pallet of strawberries I brought home with me (SO. GOOD.), but all in all, a good day for this lady of leisure. To celebrate a successful day on the farm, I whipped up a fresh veggie dinner of sweet corn and roasted potatoes with carrots, with a Finnish swiss roll full of berries and cream. Luckily i had a few willing eaters in Laura, Tyson, and my darling roomies Maren and Rachel.

I also don't have pictures of the leisurely lady activities the following day, which consisted of Melissa and Sindri coming over for some baking with berries fun. WE washed and cut and mixed and tasted and pressed and poured and talked and talked and ultimately concluded the day with a pile of strawberry rubars and blueberry cupcakes to share with the world. Made with lots of love.

Really, I do it all for you. Such a torturous summer, such hard work. xoxo.

Goals:

The other day, a friend recommended that since I was unemployed (thanks for reminding me, Josh), i should blog more. He pointed me to a great article for recent journalism grads with a list of things to boost their professional cache while unemployed this summer. Like I need that! Ahem, well, even though I'm not a journalism grad, I thought I'd pull a few of the recommendations from the list and try them out because really, it can't hurt to actually figure out how to post the interviews i conducted last summer. These are some of the things on my list (and you can hold me to it):

1. Post on my blog at least twice a week (purely for professional reasons, not narcissism).
2. Join Twitter (yes, you watch me josh, i'll do it. one of these days).
3. Actually learn why and how to use Twitter.
4. Create a podcast-- conduct interviews, edit audio, etc for a podcast. I actually have two that I've been working on for the last few years. One is The Love Story Thief, with stories about love and how it works, and the other is Refugee Voices (or something like that) with interviews with exiles from various conflict regions explaining their perspective on how peace could be achieved.
5. Finish book project with Haifa.
6. Become a guest blogger on Segullah and other blogs I read regularly.
7. Take more pictures, good ones.
8. Explore and review media and advocacy organizations, such as witness.org and others.
9. Take chances and try out new projects with my incredibly talented friends.

That is actually quite a time consuming list, but I'd really like to stick with it, especially if this whole job things takes some time. Who knows, it might even lead to a change in my career path (goodbye policy analysis, hello Cooking with Rockstars!)

What Suvi thinks about on the beach

Yesterday I rode my bike to Brighton beach with Chris. Yeah, we figured if we have to be unemployed, we might as well do stuff that everyone else wishes they were doing instead of working. It was a PERFECT day for a bike ride, and especially since the ride there from my house is pretty much an eight mile straight shot on a bike path, lined with benches of old people watching traffic.

We lay in the sand discussing Chasing the Flame by Samantha Power about Sergio Vierra de Mello, a career UN diplomat who was the Special Envoy to Iraq killed in the car bomb at the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. We're both interested in humanitarian affairs and this particular book was brutally honest in it's depiction of the UN and world political affairs, from the perspective of a very imperfect man. But it was also hopeful in the direction of committed individuals to a new brand of global diplomacy where human dignity and human rights are respected first and foremost. Read it! It is sad and fantastic.

As we were discussing (and watching an older Russian man lather sunscreen onto EVERY SINGLE INCH of his much younger wife's(?) body), I asked Chris what he would rather be doing than sitting on the beach. Obviously not many things would make that list. Definitely not an office job. Perhaps it was due to the discussion on how we could use lessons learned from Sergio's life and tragic situations in much of the country, but his response was that rather than sitting on a beach he would love to be working in the field somewhere. You know what? i would have to concur. When I think about what i want to be doing with my life, the jobs that most appeal to me are the ones where i would be working in the field, in some crisis situation, working with women and helping them access basic needs.

So what does that mean for me? No, I haven't signed up for a UN mission to Afghanistan. But that doesn't mean that I won't either.

That my friends, would be better than the beach. unless, of course, the beach has an amazing number of old, Russian men with hairy backs in speedos. Ah, Brighton Beach, you never fail to please.

RIP, MJ

Do you remember your first time? your first time really listening to Michael Jackson and knowing that he was the king? The first time you wore just one white glove on purpose?

I was at Nicole's birthday party, probably third grade. I didn't have hip, musically inclined older siblings (that would be me), so I was maybe late in the game. Nicole did, however, and even though they were from Chile, her older siblings knew EVERYTHING about Michael Jackson. Sure, i'd roller skated to his music at the rink where we'd go for school roller skating parties, but I didn't know much about him. We were at the dining room table, eating cake, and someone put on Michael Jackson. Nicole ran and got her one white glove to put on, and we all started dancing. Some kids could do the moonwalk, and I was soooo jealous. Not so jealous about the crotch grabbing dancing. Nicole's older siblings had SEEN him in concert, and so regaled us with stories about how he used to be in the Jackson Five, and then broke off on his own and became the most famous. I'd had no idea, and this new knowledge about this pop star kind of blew my mind, as did the plastic surgery rumors. He was so strange, and so talented. My parents didn't let us stay up to watch the "Thriller" music video when it came out, but i remember everyone else talking about it, and even my older sister knew about that.

That was my first time really experimenting with MJ.

Then he got all weird and married Lisa Marie Presley (which was also really strange, right?). I lost track of him until one day, I was in Cambodia, riding a bus. It was a long bus ride over rough roads, so someone had the sense to throw in a video. The best possible video ever. Michael Jackson's music videos. There I was with my friend Andy, the only white kids on this bus full of Cambodians and everyone enthralled and singing along to the songs. It was truly one of those moments where we could just turn to each other and say, hey, we are all the same, aren't we? and end all wars.

That's MJ for you, building bridges (except with the whole Never never land thing), bringing people together across the globe. you will be missed.

dreamy

last night, i dreamt that I was engaged to this skinny guy (no, i didn't recognize him). We were sitting on the kitchen floor of my apartment and he was pulling out all of these new cleaning supplies he had just bought, heavy duty, toxic cleaning supplies. I started crying and said "But i don't want to poison my babies!" I think the look on his face indicated that my babies and his babies would be mutually exclusive.

Yup. I've been thinking a lot lately about how I really want to use only natural cleaning products. And obviously babies too in my subconscious.

Women on front line of street protests - The National Newspaper

YOu'veprobably all seen the video by now- or heard of it at least-- of the woman shot in the chest by the militia in the Iranian protests and dying in a pool of her own blood. It is brutal, as are all images of people dying. But it as also served as a rallying cry for many of the demonstrators in Iran protesting the recent elections declaring President Ahmadinejad as the victor over Mousavi. While women in Iran do have relatively more freedom compared to women elsewehre inthe MIddle East, under the Ahmidenejad regime they still lack many fundamental rights under Iranian law-- such as a woman's testimony counting for only half as much as a man's. Can you imagine what it would be like to report a rape, which is already considered sucha secret and shameful thing, somewhere that your testimony didn't really matter? The enforcing of the dress code by the morality police is an obvious indication of the control that the government holds over society, and a constant reminder that there is a long way to go before freedom.

I don't know if the elections were rigged or what should be done about it. But, I do know that I support whoever will advance equal rights for women in Iran.

Women on front line of street protests - The National Newspaper

Shared via AddThis

Isi

I know a lot of people are blogging about their dads today, and many of the blogs I read will probably include adorable pictures of cute kids hugging cute dads. I wish I had some pictures from when I was little with my dad (they are all in Toronto or Finland at my grandma's house), because I was a very cute little girl (red rosy cheeks, pigtails, big mischievous smile) and my dad was a very cute dad (total hipster-looking, i never realized how cool my dad really was until I moved to Brooklyn and all the cute dads look like he did in the 70s and 80s).

I brag about my dad a lot. i don't think he knows it, because I certainly don't tell him that. maybe I should tell him how proud I am of him, but that just seems like an awkward conversation. It's so much easier to tell other people how smart he is in science and what little i understand about his important, life-saving work. It is really because of him that I try to be smart too-- I joke about how i'm the dumb one in a family full of doctors, but there is part of me hoping that the apple couldn't have fallen far from the tree. I went to graduate school for myself of course, but I have to admit, part of me was really pleased to be able to show my dad that I was accepted to a great MPA school, and I know that he was proud of me too. Yeah, he does put pressure on us academically and professionally, but over the years I've come to realize it is only because he knows that 1) hard work pays off, and 2) I think he believes in our abilities to be great and smart. i think my dad really expects me to change the world; I'm not so sure about that myself, but i really hope he doesn't stop believing that. Now if only he would be as optimistic about my chances at getting hitched...

Another way in which he has influenced my life, even moreso than the academic, is the spiritual. It's not quite as easy to brag about what a good example he has been to me, not because he hasn't been one, but because I don't think that he thinks he has been. He's not that guy who teaches Sunday School and spouts off obscure quotes from church leaders long since dead. His testimony and spiritual strength has always been more of the simple action kind. He simply lives it, without fanfare and with commitment. I think that it has been hard fought and not without struggles, but he keeps at it. He isn't perfect, but I don't need a perfect father, I need someone who understands what it is like to question things, to feel insecure and sad, to feel alone, and to still keep working at it day by day hoping to be a little better each day because it is worth it. Sure, it's sometimes annoying to always be asked "so, do you have a job yet? How's the dating going?" but it's just because he cares about me, and i know i can always go to him when i am struggling. He's played the role of "parent", both mom and dad over the years, and i am so grateful for that.

It's been said that girls marry men like their fathers. Judging from my dating line-up, i've been trying pretty hard to not make that the case. But, today as i sat in church, looking around at all of these cute little families with proud and handsome husbands and fathers, i knew very clearly what I wanted. I wanted someone who honors the priesthood and loves God. Someone who loves and supports me as his partner. Someone who adores his kids. Someone who loves telling really lame jokes. In other words, someone just like my dad.