Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Not too shabby - Do things come together or do we pull them together

It's sustained: Success in the two communications boutiques I set up after the old-line ones tanked or I allowed them to fail.  I have none of that panic that I'm fooling myself about things coming together.  My question is:  Did I finally decide it was time to stop experimenting with new businesses, a new me, and a whole new circle of friends and to put it all together. Was it up to me to say that this was the kind of success I wanted and to declare it mine?

Chrysler - Could it be The Iacocca Curse

Chrysler hasn't been doing so hot.  But neither have many of those I worked with during Lee Iacocca's turnaround of that auto company.  It's enough to think: Could there be The Iacocca Curse? 

Ugly Legs - Hillary et al.

I intend to come back in my next life with wonderful long legs like Princess Diana.  Then I won't have to struggle so hard to get to a place which I think is higher than where normal - that is women with great legs - are.  That gift of good legs will help Hillary next time around to just be, as the Beatles used to sing.  And my hunch is that just being will turn out to be a whole person.

"You couldn't wait to get out of Jersey City," - The Greek Chorus at My Sister's Funeral

Those who stayed in blue-collar, ethnic, Roman Catholic Jersey City, New Jersey never knew what happened to those of us who left.  Sure, I would return for funerals.  The last one I would attend was in 2001 when my older sister Camille Genova Klinga died.  She had remained, at least in spirit, in nearby in working-class Edison, New Jersey.  At every one of those funerals I got in and out.  I grieved back in my other worlds.  And when you flee your beginnings, you sure do wind up in many strange lands.  This time I couldn't get in and out.  The death of a sibling is a unique experience: The parallel past we shared went with her. I was thrown off my game, every piece of it but especially the running.

All those singles in my area who want to meet me - Why?

You must get them too:  Those hourly emails about singles in your area who want to meet you.  That's a puzzle to me.  Why would they want to meet a 63-year-old porker with credit-card debt?  Also, I have more or less lost my ability to interact in-person since as a blogger and ghostwriter I am online, in Word, or in my head most of the time.

My Family on Park Avenue - Path-Train Ride from Jersey City, NJ

I never liked them.  Now I even sense they are on a downward trajectory, or at least stuck professionally.  But I can't let go of my family on Park Avenue in Manhattan.  They're clients I've had on and off for the past 13 years.  Years that have been lived out in dog time, at least for me, the sweet sufferer.

Seymour, CT, et al. - Valley of Many Many Sorrows

If those great Southern writers can fall in love with a place, then this Northern writer can not only hate one but do something about it.  That's my insight, after gaining back the size I lost.  For about six weeks I have been wrestling with my cellular memory of Seymour, Connecticut and other parts of that state.  The memory is all bad.  In addition to Seymour, I lived in Stamford, Norwalk, Bloomfield, North Haven, New Haven, and West Hartford.  Not one moment of non-suffering.  Now that I have reached this point of realization, I intend to take decisive action.

Lousy Childhood - Bid for One on E-Bay

Of course there are exceptions.  Not every bigfoot success required a lousy childhood to achieve in unique ways.  Ben Bradlee, who led the WASHINGTON POST during Watergate, had such wonderful early years that when he wrote his autobiography he titled it "A Charmed Life."  But most leaders, writers, inventors et al. acquired major wounds during those tender years.  Charles Schulz, who gave birth to Peanuts, knew that.  That's why he didn't dare try to heal through therapy.  He sensed that would diminish his talent.

Those Eleanor Rigby Evenings - If Only They Were Scheduled

Are all those lonely people, like Eleanor Rigby who the Beatles and Douglas Coupland memorialized, the exceptions?  Or are the lonely the way most of us feel too often?

I wondered that this evening, one that started out like every other.  I was content, alone.  Then, out of nowhere, I was zapped with a bolt of loneliness.  My life flashed before me with all its hours just like those I spent tonight.  Of course, I saw myself as a total failure.  In the 1950s when I was growing up, we were told that losers wound up lonely.  The ones doing the telling gave us the rules on how not to become losers, thus lonely.

Higher Ed Special

It's getting and having a degree, isn't it.  That's what drives us to assume we are special.  And it's that assumption, I realized recently, which makes us The Degreed sitting ducks for underemployment and downright hopelessness.