Having The Last Word

We’ve all heard the term “famous last words.” But what about the having the final words? My friend and fellow author, Barbara Musser, wrote an article whose words resonated with me. She said, “Had I known that my last conversation with my mother was the final one before her sudden death, I would have chosen to say other things to her.” Here is the full post: http://www.sexyaftercancer.com/sexy-blog/heart-broken-open/. It’s ironic how often I choose my words so carefully when I write and so carelessly when I address people in my life who matter. Do you do this? Do you brush someone off when

Read more

Is It Time for Some Plastic Surgery?

I had plastic surgery last week. l cut up my credit cards. –  Henny Youngman I’ve decided to give up using credits cards this winter. I froze my credit.  I placed my cards in a plastic storage bag and put them in the freezer away from my hot hands. I’ve decided to nip and tuck my expenses and rethink what “living within my means” actually means. Doing this is no mean feat. I think living in New York has given me a warped sense of what “my means” and “my needs” actually are. Many of us start feeling a financial pinch when

Read more

Lips, Hands and Butts

Body parts are in the news. I’m not talking about crime stories about severed fingers in the mail or cooked parts of meat and fowl. I’m talking about human body parts that people are selling, buying and exhibiting for profit.  It used to be the idea of buying and selling body parts was linked to scary stories about people being kidnapped for their kidneys. Or a heart being yanked out of a body for a cult ceremony.  On the humanitarian side, people donate kidneys to save patients in renal failure and eyes to rescue sight.  Heart transplants have been one of the

Read more

Are You Living Happily Ever After?

Recently I attended a birthday party with a group of friends who are women. We are all about the same age give or take a few years: that halfway milepost some people call middle age.   A question was raised and discussed: “What are we doing with the rest of our lives?” We all talked about wanting to feel more settled, balanced and in a better place, but it wasn’t necessarily the here and now.  I wondered: “When and where does one live happily ever after?” Most of us grew up programmed to find jobs, be successful, get married, raise

Read more

A Place Where Time Stands Still

The passage of time always hits home around the holidays. It’s a combination of reflecting back on both the year that you are leaving and the one you are about to enter.  For me, the new year also rings in my birthday and contemplation about growing older, maintaining health and happiness and serving my purpose in life. But there’s one place I always find where time seems to stand still: the bedroom where I spent my formative years in Chattanooga. I go back every few months and often at Christmas.  The room, with a few exceptions, remains locked in time.

Read more

Me, My Selfie, and I

When did we become so self-obsessed? I mean…..selfie obsessed. It seems like everyone is pointing and shooting at themselves in self admiration and self indulgence.  The folks who publish the Oxford Dictionary recently named “Selfie” its 2013 Word of the Year.  The dictionary’s definition of “selfie” is a photograph one takes of his/her self with a smart phone or webcam and then uploads to social media site(s). I think selfies can be fun as long as they are taken at appropriate times and focusing on appropriate parts of the body.  But many of them are not very pretty or polite. I keep seeing

Read more

Another Reason To Get Moving

A new study was presented this week at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium http://www.sabcs.org which looked at whether exercise could help relieve joint pain, a common side effect for women taking certain kinds of anti-cancer drugs, as well as for countless other humans as we move through the aging process. As reported in today’s USA Today: “Researchers randomly assigned half of participants to a supervised exercise program, involving 2.5 hours of aerobic exercises such as walking, as well as two strength training sessions overseen by a coach with experience working with breast cancer survivors. After a year, women assigned to

Read more

The Giving Season

 “You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson American Poet  If Summer and Fall are considered the growing seasons, Winter is the official giving season. In fact, Tuesday, December 3, has been named The National Day of Giving  #givingtuesday with an international movement and website dedicated to motivating companies and individuals to work toward giving back to help the common good. I like the idea of #givingtuesday starting a movement. It is a comforting detour from Black Friday, Monday Madness, Cyber Tuesday,and Gridlock Friday because it

Read more

The Glass Wall

Everyone always talks about “The Glass Ceiling” that women face to get ahead in their careers. The old boys network is usually blamed along with good old-fashioned sexism.  But I find there is also a glass wall erected by other women that is equally unsettling sexism. You may have experienced the glass wall in business or socially.  It might be a subtle snub, a touch of aloofness in the conversation or a verbal  “I am simply too busy with…my work, my children, my commitments… to make time for you, or simply no response. It might be an indirect hit such as being

Read more

The Healing Power of Dance

“Dance is the hidden language of the soul” ― Martha Graham I’ve always felt my most vibrant, most creatively free and most beautiful when I am dancing. But I never truly understood the healing power of dance until later in life when I turned to dance movement to rebuild my body, mend a broken heart and reclaim my creative energy.   “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.” ― Xiaolu Guo As a young girl I trained first in ballet, then modern and jazz.  I was a somewhat ugly duckling, lacking in the “cute category” and taunted by

Read more

Do You Really Want My Opinion?

Given how many people don’t want  to speak with public relations people (see last week’s post), there seems to be a lot of companies who want my opinion. I am getting barraged with emails asking me for surveys.  Are you? Recently  I was asked to give a “customer satisfaction survey” for Amazon, American Express, Delta Air Lines, Starwood, Sephora, Facebook, Office Depot and a few more.  Every time I contact a customer service line I am asked to take a “short survey.” The thing is, not all the surveys are short and most just seem to want to massage the

Read more

Power to the (PR) People

With close to 30 years working in the public relations profession, sometimes with mixed feelings about my career choice, I am going to get this off my chest loud and clear: The next time someone disparages the public relations field or publicists in front of me, I am going to speak my mind and not mince words. “Power to the PR People.” I am in the middle of promoting my book, Getting Things Off My Chest: A Survivor’s Guide to Staying Fearless and Fabulous in the Face of Breast Cancer.” The experience has given me new respect for skilled publicists.

Read more