I’ve been meaning for years to write a list of all the great theater I’ve seen in my life, thanks largely to my theater-loving dad. The production that’s on my mind this week, for obvious reasons, was one that I attended not with my dad but with his wife, Ruth, in London in 2001.
I had become aware of Alan Rickman when I saw Sense & Sensibility while on a visit to my friend Sue in Dallas in 1995 (I hadn’t seen Die Hard at that point – not my kind of movie). As soon as the film was over, Sue and I turned to each other and said: “Who was that?!?” We had shared tastes in men since high school, and Rickman was instant-crush material even in our 30s – that voice!
Not surprisingly, I had a lot of time to read this year. I also had a lot of material, in part because many kind people bought me books (and DVDs) from my Amazon wish list. Below, in no particular order, is a not quite a complete listing of what I read and re-read this year, I’m certainly forgetting things, and not listing some books that I haven’t finished (or, in some cases, even started) yet.
…one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. Continue reading Books I Read (or Re-Read) in 2015→
In the past I’ve said that every year of my life has gotten at least a little better than the ones before it. I’ve chosen to believe that even in years when it wasn’t strictly true by most measures. 2015… well, I can’t say it was a good year, though some aspects were, in between a whole lot of nastiness. But… I survived it, with abundant proof that my life is worth fighting for, to me and to others.
I have a feeling that 2016 will be not just better than 2015, but better than most of my life to date. 2015 was just a bump in the road, and it’s behind me now.
ps If you want deep end of year reflections, read this.
^ photo: We caught the year getting ready to change on King’s Wharf, Sydney.
So… it’s been a year 13 months since I was diagnosed with breast cancer and began treatment. A long, arduous year, the likes of which I hope never to see again.
At the moment, I don’t have the time, energy, or interest to do a full recap. The short version: I found a 2.3cm tumor in my right breast. The tumor (along with a large but not disfiguring chunk of my breast) was removed, along with some axillary lymph nodes (to which the cancer had not spread). Continue reading One Year On→
People tend to stay with Ericsson for many years, some for their entire careers – which can make it a little weird to be a newbie around here. There’s a lot I still don’t know about this huge, complex, historic company, and I really didn’t know what to expect when … well, let me tell this story in some kind of order.
I started with Ericsson in June, 2014, in a business unit (Cloud & IP) that was only just being formed. I was immediately thrown into the thick of things, and was loving my job: exciting challenges, great colleagues, lots of travel… In fact, I was in Paris at a tech conference in early November when I got my breast cancer diagnosis. Being told that you have cancer is very, very scary. Wondering whether your job may be at risk because of your illness makes it all the more frightening. I knew that I had great benefits at Ericsson, including very good health insurance. I also knew that the state of California, where I live and work, has a law protecting employees and their jobs in case of catastrophic illness (your own or a family member’s) – but that law applies only after you’ve been in a job for a year, and I had been an employee for less than six months.
by Christopher Hitchens
