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.