Life As We Know It

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

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

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.

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

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

 “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

“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

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

I have a confession to make: I would rather get a good night’s sleep over a good night of sex. And evidently I am not alone. According to a 2012 survey by the Better Sleep Council nearly 80 percent of women would rather get a good night’s sleep that have sex. Here are a few stats from the survey which definitely woke me up: 6 in 10 Americans crave sleep more than sex Some admit to falling asleep during sex Men crave sex (over sleep) more than women (58% vs. 21% women) Women crave sleep (over sex) more than men (79%

This week was a milestone moment which had me going a mile a minute. Two back-to-back book launch events, several interviews, client appointments and writing deadlines nipping at my heels left me fearless, fabulous….and breathless. Dashing around the city from appointment to appointment in the searing late summer heat, playing catch-up to missed meetings and trying to remember names and faces of everyone I was seeing and thanking left me a bit foggy.  And then I was reminded to Push the Pause Button.   I was reminded on September 11 when my friend Kevin, former wine director for Windows on the

I learned the meaning of four words this past week as I traveled back to Atlanta and Tennessee to reconnect with old friends, family and colleagues, and make new friends with women from all over the country attending a Women’s Cancer Survivor Convention in Nashville. The words are Think, Thank, Listen, Share.   “Think” as in think before you speak or post. How you say something can be interpreted many ways, and words are harder to retract these days. Two examples: Women cancer survivors shared stories about misinformed comments people make such as “Oh, you have the good kind of cancer.” (told to a women with thyroid cancer).