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Awesome Women, Blogging, Bullying, Coming Home, Culture of breast cancer, Facebook, Feminism, Health, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Memoir, Movies, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Teaching, Toxic Workplaces, Twitter, Women in Politics, Workplace Bullying, Workplace Mobbing, Writing
Follow you. Follow me. Richie Havens R.I.P.
In the summer of 1968, a young Richie Havens told Rolling Stone magazine that the direction for his music was heaven. Until his death at 72 last week, Richie Havens embodied the notion of music as a transcendent medium for connection: Music is the major form of communication. It’s the commonest vibration, the people’s news broadcast … I think I’m ready…
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Bullying, Feminism, Goodfellas, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Mother Daughter Relationship, Toxic Workplaces, Workplace Bullying, Workplace Mobbing
burn out, bullying, and rekindling the flame
If you’ve never been on fire, then how can you burn out? Let me count the ways. Yesterday, or the day before, I wrote about bullying in the workplace. As an aside, I am beginning to lose track of the days, which reminds me I could always play a new card – Post Cancer Cognitive Impairment (PCCI); or just admit that I have…
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Arimidex, Feminism, Fiftieth Birthday, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Language of Cancer, Marge Piercy, Mother Daughter Relationship, Poetry, Tamoxifen
vintage me . . . I’m still here
On the first day or the last day of every school year, I force my daughter to pose for a photograph. It’s just one of those non-negotiable traditional things that comes around but once a year. All I ask is that she smile while holding a sign declaring the grade level ahead of or behind her. She used to love…
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Amputation, Awesome Women, Breast Cancer Treatment, Cancer Language, Culture of breast cancer, Damian Gorman, Feminism, Fiftieth Birthday, Guest Post, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Language matters, Lois Hjemlstad, Marge Piercy, Mastectomy, Memoir, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Teaching, Ted Kooser, Writing
Amputation by any other name . . .
This post includes a 1930 video of the Radical Amputation of A Left Breast. Viewer Discretion Advised. I discovered the elegance of Lois Hjelmstad‘s poetry and prose in March 2012. Tentatively broaching the subject of my return to work, having undergone a mastectomy just 47 days earlier, I wrote in Resuming Old Ways of the final pre-operative surgical procedure – the administration of the…
