I get an incredible amount of email from people with Asperger Syndrome. It’s all really similar. Here’s a sample:

“I’m 45 and a lawyer and I have Aspergers. I don't know what is appropriate, and not appropriate some of the time, such as talking too much about very personal info, or saying something that offends someone.

“I've gone through many friends in life.  Most can't deal with me, I've never been married, relationships get complicated, but luckily I've had a few who hung on regardless of my flaws.

“How do you feel and deal with the fallout when you say things that cause more problems than you would have had if you just kept your mouth shut? I want to take the attitude that if I say something inappropriate and it's held against me, screw 'em, I'm not going to worry about it, life is short.

“Do you think there a way of saying inappropriate, blunt things into an asset even though others don't approve of your behavior?”

I respond to everyone. I don’t even know why I’m writing this in a post – that I respond to all my emails. Because it just means I’ll get more. But I think, even though I know it’s terrible time management to respond to all emails, I must like it because look: I launched the Mailbag section. The emails are probably human contact that I need.

I was going to respond to this guy via email, and then I thought how we all have problems that we don’t know how to solve. Asperger’s is interesting to people in part because it’s just one version of the bazillion versions of personality flaws that each of us has to deal with about ourselves.

I am similar to the guy in the email above: I go through friends fast. I piss off colleagues. I feel lucky when people hang onto me. Honestly, I get frustrated with trying to fit in. It's really hard work and I'm really bad at it and it makes me want to give up.

I keep myself from giving up by making rules for myself. I can’t make the problem go away, but I can manage myself to limit how often my deficits will show. Here are three rules I have:

1. Don’t talk if possible.
Ryan Healy once told me that the only time I sound normal is when I’m giving an interview to a journalist. This is probably true. Because it’s not really a two-way conversation. It’s lecturing. In non-lecture situations I try very hard to say as little as possible, especially when situations seem like they have social conventions tied to them. I assume I do not know the rules. I try to tell people what I'm feeling so they know that I am trying hard to say the right thing even if I am not saying the right thing.

2. Don’t use the phone.
For some reason, people feel that a phone call does not have to stay on topic. In fact, people open up a phone call by talking with you about the thing that is not the topic. For example, “How have you been?” This question is disconcerting for me. Is the person really calling to talk about our mental state? Or do they mean our physical state? Or is that a fake question and the real topic is coming. I get nervous immediately because I don’t know what we are talking about. In an email, though, I can read through the whole thing, get to the topic, and respond directly to the topic. Email is so straightforward, and even if it’s not, it’s asynchronous, so I can ask for help.

3. Don’t tell jokes.
It will surprise you, I think, that I am very shy about making a joke. I do not understand jokes other people make, and I have been told that I make the kind of jokes a ten-year-old makes. (I love puns, for example, and I make pictures of people in Legos.) I know that people think this blog is funny. I know people think I’m funny. But the Farmer once explained me this way: “She is funny, but she doesn’t know she is being funny. She is sitcom-funny.”

I make rules like those three but I still get into lots of trouble.

The truth is that the only thing I am good at when it comes to dealing with Asperger’s, is controlling my environment and getting help when I can't. For example, there was tons of stupid stuff in this post that my blog editor cut.

When I have an email to answer that I think is complicated in the social rules department, I will forward it to a friend to ask if my answer is going to be okay.

I have a small group of friends that will edit me. I know which one will edit which thing, and when is a good time to reach them without bugging them.

When I want to throw a fit at work, I have a board member whose major job on the board is to keep me at bay. And I love him for helping me.

If I could give one piece of advice to everyone with Aspergers it would be to surround yourself with people who will help you and then trust them; do what they say.

And parents, if you have a kid with Asperger’s teach them to ask for help. Posing the question is so difficult. It’s so much easier to spew information than ask for information.

And for all of you who do not have Aspergers, I think there is a lesson here as well: We each have a deficit that could hold us back. Get help for it, on a regular basis. No one can get through life as a lone ranger.

We each have lots of assumptions about what is right and wrong, how the world works, how people should act in a civilized community. When faced with true diversity – that is, diversity of experience — we have to allow our assumptions to be challenged. It's hard to not feel some repulsion for the person who challenges our core assumptions.

But it's clear to me that diversity in the workplace is difficult to achieve because we must ask so much of ourselves in order to achieve it. We must allow ourselves to experience repulsion and keep an open mind while doing that.

And now, I will write about cats; specifically, the 150 comments people left on my last post about why I killed my cat. Last week I thought I was not really writing about cats because I was writing about dead cats. And anyway, really I was writing about the moral problem of paid links. But in fact, I still have the problem that I now find myself doing the very worst, low level, terrible job on the internet: writing content about cats.

In the business world, cats are the topic-non-grata. If I go into an investor meeting to discuss business models for online content, it takes only about five minutes before I hear, “I just don’t want to see posts about cats.”

But I think we can all be better at thinking in diverse ways, in diverse environments, if I indulge in one more post about cats. So here I go.

1. Don't shield yourself from complex thinking. If you think killing my cat was absolutely, hands down a terrible decision, then you probably don’t have the same moral code I do. So maybe you should just stop reading my blog, but probably you should  just not let me take care of your cat. Listening to people who have ideas that are patently different from your own make you think harder. (This is why I read publications like Al-Jazeera and Car & Driver.)

2. Diverse ways of thinking can co-exist only rarely. With an open mind.
Hard-core questions of morality have no right answer. Can a mother kill someone to feed her child? Can a mother kill one child to save another? Have you never heard these questions from college Ethics 101? These are real issues, and behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational, shows that how we answer these questions has more to do with how we are born—how we were hard-wired to see the world—than what is objectively right and wrong. Some people will say killing is wrong, so you can't kill anything ever. Other people will see this moment as an exception.

This New Yorker cartoon hits the spot because the intersection of humans and animals is fraught with complex moral systems:

Often there is no right answer – for cats, children or meat-counter decisions –  but you challenge yourself more in life if you open your life up to people who are wired differently than you are, without trying to squash those differences.

3. Understanding moral context requires placing oneself in unfamiliar situations. Hey, all you cat commenters, have you lived on a farm? Do you understand the problems with farm cats? Do you understand there is a moral question of whether we should even feed babies who are born in the dead of winter? (We feed them.) Do you understand that most cats cannot be spayed because they can't be caught?

Our favorite goat broke his leg. The Farmer wanted to slaughter him for meat. He is a little young, but the farm is a business, and financially it makes more sense to take the meat while we can than to bet on that the goat will return to good health. We have a lot of goats, and if they were all pets, we could not afford to feed them. So goat decisions on our farm are often business decisions.

But because our farm is a mix of city people and country people — people with vastly different sets of experiences — moral decisions are often more complex on our farm than other farms. In the end, Melissa decided she wanted to treat the goat as a pet. She loves the goat. So she took responsibility for nursing him back to health. The odds were not good, and the splint is made of two nail files, but she was devoted. And slept with him in the barn.

3. Real diversity is personally challenging. Here are things I thought were patently wrong before I lived on the farm: Drowning cats. Shooting possums. Peeing on the front lawn. Feeding sub-par food to animals. Confining animals in labor. Branding cattle. Notching an animal’s ear. I could go on forever.

Whole Foods has a five-tiered program to let customers know where their animal products comes from. There are five hoops farmers can jump through to get rated by Whole Foods. The Farmer – my farmer – absolutely loves his animals and he will spend all night in a rain storm to keep one alive for one more day. But he doesn’t even meet the first standard—the bottom rung—with Whole Foods.

Now that I live on a farm, I see both sides of everything. People are not morally depraved. They are living in the context of their own community. We all grow a lot more personally by trying to understand people rather than judging them.

It's no easy task, though. I know this myself, because I still hate cat people.

Sorry but it’s the truth. People who treat animals like humans are people who cannot cope with complexities of human relationships. People who think their cat gives them what they need for companionship are probably right, because they are so underdeveloped emotionally. I am not alone in my thinking. Here is a great parody of a dating video as the perfect illustration of my point:

Watch this video on YouTube.

There are, in fact, jobs where mostly women belong, and there are jobs where mostly men belong, and that’s fine. It’s outdated to think there are no differences between men and women. And once we accept there are differences, we need to study them instead of downplay them.

One of the most difficult parts of coming of age today is that there are no clear paths in the new topography of work. The terms quarterlife crisis and emerging adulthood have come to us as a result of the new scramble to figure out where to go in adult life.  In order to create safe, compassionate, growth-oriented paths through adult life, we need to understand where women and men fit best.

I have taken a lot of shots at this topic before. Most notably, I’ve pointed out that women want to be with kids more than men do. That explains Pew's findings that most women want part-time jobs rather than full-time jobs after they have kids, but men do not.

But what about gender differences before there are kids? Where do men belong? Where do women belong? Here are three places women do not generally fit:

1. Highly competitive sales jobs are not for most women.

Most women are not happy when they are competing, rather than collaborating with their co-workers, whereas men love competition, according to a study from the University of Chicago. And  research from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that even in the case of men who are poor competitors or women who are strong competitors, the gender-based preferences for competition persist.

Women who achieve high levels of success played sports as kids and experienced huge satisfaction with winning. However women are less likely than men to choose competitive environments due to millions of years of evolution encouraging women to mitigate risks to protect themselves for their children. (Tons of studies support this, but my current favorite is from Anne Campbell, psychologist at Durham University in England.)

So who is a good fit for a career in sales? Richard Goldman, COO of Birkman International, a company that helps businesses make intelligent hires by using the Birkman Method for personality assessments, explains that collaborative, team-player types simply do not make good salespeople. When it comes to sales, though, the people who are the best fit for the high-level jobs are those who have an eat-what-you-kill mentality.

2. Men are better at very high-level math, science and engineering.

A 2008 survey of US universities by the National Science Foundation revealed that less than 30% of PhDs in the physical sciences were awarded to women. Higher up the ranks, women make up only about 10% of full professorships in physics-related disciplines. Yet a study from psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University found no evidence of gender bias during the interview and hiring process for science positions.

Now that we have a few decades of data coming from girls who were encouraged to do math, we can say, with a decent amount of certainty, that the average girl is as good at math as the average boy. But in the world of hotshot math, women are outclassed.

One fundamental difference between the male and female brain is gray matter. And University of California at Irvine released solid data to explain why men are good at math.

“Evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology who led the study.

“In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of—or connections between—these processing centers.”

This chart, from Gene Expression, shows the difference in brain makeup.

Also, now that we have a slew of data about Asperger’s syndrome, we can say that the people who are incredibly terrible with language (white matter) or incredibly gifted with mathematical thinking (gray matter) are usually boys. Boys, rather than girls, populate the two extreme ends of the bell curve.

So it should not be surprising or controversial that studies repeatedly find that there are large gender differences among extremely gifted math students. More boys are gifted.

Now the world starts making sense. This is why there are more men in math and science positions in universities. This is why the hot-shot companies in Silicon Valley are full of male engineers and not women.  And this is why we need to stop complaining that science departments are boys clubs. It’s not just the department—high end scientific thinking is a boys club.

3. Men are best suited for the insanely fast-paced startup arena.

More than 95% of venture capital goes to male-run startups. (To be clear, we are talking here about companies that plan to grow to more than $100 million in sales over five years and these companies court investors to achieve that.)

These startups are largely male, and the reason is that women are not interested in the crazy life that startup founders live. Women prefer lifestyle-focused companies where they can have better control over the intersection of their work life and personal life.

I laid out the argument in a post on TechCrunch, but, as you can imagine, it comes down to kids. Women want to spend more time with kids, and they have less desire to give up everything for their company. It would be great if you could do both, but when it comes to startups, you can’t.

If you poll women who are CEOs of venture-backed startups as well as mothers, you will find that most women have either lost their marriage or their sanity while trying to run a startup and a family. Of course, no woman (besides me) will say this publicly because it will kill her career as an entrepreneur. One woman, (who has been lauded on TechCrunch for her startup), told me confidentially that she is getting a divorce and her husband thinks her drive is pathological. Which, frankly, is probably true, because much has been written about how most successful entrepreneurs are almost-but-not-quite crazy.

And Sara Lacy has explained the process whereby the boys-club startup founders perpetuate the boys club: if you get through it once, you can keep going, and helping other people to live out the crazy, family-unfriendly pipe-dreams of startup founders.

Many of you will want to tell me stories of the exceptions. I know. I’m one of them. I’ve driven myself and my ex-husband completely insane with my startup dramas, and I keep doing them. Each time I tell myself I will stay small. I will do a lifestyle business, and then I don’t. I think too big and I take in outside funding.

But going into a field where you are the gender minority is very difficult. For one thing, people judge you more harshly, and you are more quickly to be deemed a failure. And it feels uncomfortable. Sure, it’s fun to be the only woman in the room because you get a lot of attention, but on balance, Live Science reports that women are uncomfortable in a male-dominated setting.

One of the worst adages of feminism was “you can be anything.” Because you can’t. You can’t be an iconoclast if you’re not. And most of us are not. It’s a lonely life. Why encourage it? Look at the paths that have a more sure footing. Look at the lives they create. If you like that life, give it a try.

When we look to create new paths for new careers, look at what real lives look like along the way. If you are 20 and you want to be the rare woman getting a PhD in math, ask yourself, are you really that different from all other people? And if you are 30 and you want to get funding for your startup, ask yourself if you truly are crazy enough to give up sanity for a company. Most of us look for more stable, surefooted ways to go through life. That’s rational behavior.

So you might think this is December-is-full-of-good-cheer-post  – you know, me thanking men for all they’ve done for me at work. But no. It’s me asking for even more. It’s my wish list for what else men could be doing.

This is not grand stuff. Okay. I mean, women are doing better in school than men, outearning men, and look, now even Time magazine says women don’t  need marriage as much as men do. So it’s not like women are in trouble. But still, men could do some stuff to make life better for women at work.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Buy flowers.
Women are happier when there are flowers in the room. Don’t send red roses, because that means I love you. And don’t send pink roses, because that means I wish I could sleep with you and then send red roses. Send a fun bouquet. If you think this is not what goes on in the upper echelons of the workplace, then read my post about Mark Benioff sending me flowers. It was great. We both got what we wanted, which is what the workplace is really about.

2. Take leave when you have a child.
Companies that have paternity leave policies rarely have to pay for them because men don't use paternity leave. Maybe it’s because taking leave kills your career. We all know that. We also know that the arrival of children is the genesis of salary disparity between men and women. But it is still essential for women to take leave. (Confession: I did not take time off and I lost my mind.) If men took leave, they would effectively change how the workplace deals with taking leave. If everyone took leave when they had a kid it would be too much trouble to penalize people. It’s sort of like job hopping. When the whole generation does it, no one is penalized. And, here’s a great little piece of research for you last few doubters: Taking maternity leave is better for your baby.)

3. Don’t look at porn at work.
Don’t tell me you don’t do it, okay? Porn sites get the majority of their traffic during the workday. The opportunity here is that men do a better job of working with women if the men don't look at porn during the day. So, if you want to be a non-collaborative grouch to the women around you, you should do your porn at night, when you’re home with your significant other. She can take you to task on it more effectively than your co-workers.

4. Show your forearms.
If you are going to insist on making the workplace sexual, at least do it in a way that appeals to women. Women like to look at mens' forearms. That’s right. In the same way that men like to look at womens’ cleavage. It must be from the days when women were looking to mate with a guy who was strong enough to kill a lion. Or something.

5. Encourage women to break rules.
Women follow rules better than men do, so the women do better in school. But, there is no correlation between doing well in school and doing well in adult life. And there might be a reverse correlation, because school is about doing what you’re told, but strong performers in business make their own rules.

Maybe this is why most big law firms have no women in their top 10 rainmakers. This is because it’s an ill-defined, outside-the-rules-of-what-you-learn-in-law-school kind of job. But these are the people who make the money and have the flexibility to have a lifestyle they want outside of work—one not so hours-bound.

So for women to really get the kind of workplace they want – flexible, responsive, and engaging, the women are going to need to break some rules. And the men can help by encouraging women to do that.

So a lot of people naturally ask, “How are we going to change things if no one reports the problem?” But no one changes corporate America by sacrificing her career. Which is what you end up doing if you report harassment. You lose your job. Not legally, but for some other reason. Because it’s so easy to fire someone and so smart for the company to fire anyone who complains about harassment.

You can say that’s unfair but you can’t say it’s not reality. You are better off taking care of harassment yourself, and staying in the game and getting power at work to make change.

Here's a great example of how that happens: Judge Kimba Wood, of NYC, receive a request to be excused from court for a Bris (the Jewish circumcision ceremony). Judge Wood's response (which I verified) is a great moment for girls, and women, and for everyone, really. She shows us that if you do a great job at work, you can use your stature to make small earthquakes when you have the chance:

So today, I woke up at 4am, and started my daily tour of the web before writing. At the Huffington Post there was something about the glass ceiling. It caught my eye because I’m sick of glass ceiling BS and I wanted to see who wrote the article so I could hate her.

But the article was about politics, which I don’t pretend to know very much about, and it was written by a woman running for Congress. That seemed potentially interesting. So I clicked.

Turns out it’s Krystal Ball (who realizes she has an unfortunate name and addresses that in her post) who is running to represent Virginia in the U.S. Congress, and if she wins she’ll be the first woman under 30 to do so.

I like that. I like the idea of young women in Congress. New perspective. New issues. More collaboration.

So I read her post and it turns out there are racy pictures of her on the Internet, and she wrote the obvious response: Women are sexual beings. It’s okay.

There is a history of women’s sexuality not being compatible with legitimate power. And I have spent a lot of my career trying to figure out how sex and power go together in a legitimate way.

Ball summarizes the problem here, when she writes about the advice older women have given her:

I was often told to cut my hair, to wear shorter heels, to dress in drab colors. I realized it was actually because they wanted to protect me. They did this because, for their generation, female sexuality was dangerous to display in the workplace, especially in politics.

But this is impractical advice for a generation of women who are living their whole lives online. There are so many photos of these women online already, that there is no way to portray a grown woman in 2010 as asexual.

Ball dives in head first:

How did I end up with private photos of me at 22 with my ex-husband across the entire Internet, and in papers from London to New York to Boston? It's not because people care about the Congressional race in the first district of Virginia or because of my positions on energy independence, school choice, marriage equality, or pro-growth environmentalism.

But Ball walks a fine line. She knows that the photos have nothing to do with her campaign. She knows the tactic to ignore issues and go for salaciousness is nothing new. But she is not immune to having her feelings hurt.

And now, I present to you: A generation of women who are not only going to cry at the office, they are going to cry in their husband’s arms, and they are going run for Congress, all at the same time.

They wanted me to collapse in a ball of embarrassment and to hang my head in shame. After all, when you are a woman named Krystal Ball, 28 years old, running for Congress, well, you get the picture. Stripper. Porn star. I've heard them all. So, I sat in my husband's arms and cried. I thought about my little girl. I couldn't stand the idea that I had somehow damaged the cause of young women running for office. I couldn't stand the idea that I might shame my family, my friends or my supporters in some way.

The reason I love this post is that it’s not black and white. It’s about the complicated way women deal with their sexuality and power and vulnerability. All at once.

Ball talks about how it is no coincidence that the two Republicans in Congress who are consistently willing to cross party lines are women. We already know that women are more collaborative in the workplace, and Ball convinces me that she will help create a more collaborative government.

Even if she’s not as left-leaning as I am. Even if she's a member of the NRA. Do you know how to tell people that it’s okay for women to be sexual and have power in Congress? Donate money to Ball’s campaign. I did, just now. Here’s the link for you:

http://www.krystalballforcongress.com

So I’m going to give you four twitter tips that no one else will tell you.

1. Focus on quality over quantity
First, let’s talk about purpose. Why are you on twitter anyway? There are tons of really valid goals for twitter, but most of them require influence. I mean, you need twitter influence in order to reach almost any goal on twitter. Because twitter is about sharing information with people who matter to you.

If you want to publicize stuff on twitter you definitely need influence. But at the other end of the spectrum (where I am) if you just want to write well, you also need influence because if you are writing and no one is listening then you are not really communicating.

The biggest reason for you to focus on influence, though, is that money doesn’t make us happy, but influence does. I spent two hours trying to find this article in the New York Times. I can’t find it because as soon as you put influence and happiness in a search string you get stuff that influences happiness but you can’t search influence influence happiness. Anyway, trust me that if you have influence, you feel happier.

Which maybe means that the smartest thing you can do is obsessively watch Twitter rankings. But it probably means that you should think about if you have the type of followers you want. For example, if your goal is to sell timeshares in Nairobi, you only need 24 followers as long as they each book two weeks out of the year.

Or, here’s another way to think about it. The founder of LinkedIn, Konstantin Guericke, once told me that you only need 30 contacts to have a quality network as long as the contacts are well connected. I think this probably means that you only need 30 twitter followers who really care about what you say if you are using twitter to build a network that will support you in your career.

2. Get a writing partner
Twitter is basically a writing platform. So why is the writing so bad? Why are people so uninteresting? I think the best way to get influence on twitter is to be interesting. More tweets that are not interesting is not as effective as a fewer tweets that are interesting. The larger a twitter following you want, the more you have to concentrate on writing what a larger audience would want—and not just what your immediate friends want.

So, when it comes to writing for a large audience, maybe you should have a helper. I have a twitter editor. For me, it’s very normal because I’ve been a writer for so long, with various editors, that it was natural for me to have a blog editor, and once you have a blog editor, a twitter editor is not a far leap.

Anyway, very few people have been creative geniuses on their own. Joshua Wolf Shenk has a whole column on Slate devoted to this topic or partnering to release creative genius. He says there’s tons of research to show that you need a cohort:

To illustrate the consistently hidden partner with an obvious example: Book editors don't put their names on covers. Their reputation largely depends on authors—who can be notoriously ungrateful and committed to the idea of their solitary genius. Jack Kerouac's On The Road sat on slush piles all around Manhattan until Malcolm Cowley, then an editor at Viking, undertook the laborious effort (literary, political, emotional) of shaping it for publication. But afterward, Kerouac and the Beats portrayed Cowley as a villain who muddied the famous unbroken typescript, which they claimed was powered by Benzedrine and holy light.

Some of you, probably those of you who think you’re such a genius that you can’t work with anyone else, doubt this premise. So here’s another good example from Shenk of us thinking that we see people do things on their own, but we don’t:

Tiger's distance control was a problem," Williams explained to Golf magazine. "So I would adjust yardages and not tell him." Woods ended up hitting the ball inside two feet from the cup and went on to win. Williams has said that he gave Woods incorrect yardages for the better part of five years.

So if you want to focus on doing good writing, which will guarantee that you build a community of people who appreciate good writing (which, we all know, eliminates 90% of the population) then you need a writing partner, or at least a good muse.

3. Focus on happiness.
I am over the happiness thing, to be honest. I am done trying to be happy. When Tyler Cowen first told me that interesting lives are nicer than happy lives, I thought he was an Asperger’s apologist. But I am really feeling that as long as I have a few friends who are all trying to live interesting lives as well, I am fine. I don’t need to strive for happiness. (Do you want to know if you strive for happiness or interestingness? Take this test.)

This is, of course, after I followed every piece of happiness advice out there and moved to one of the places in America that has the highest density of happiness: Rural Wisconsin.

But, anyway, if you want to be the center of influential social networks, you need to appear happy, according to research from Nicholas Christakis, professor of sociology at Harvard University. Maybe I am the exception to this rule. Because I am able to find the yucky messiness in any happy situation but I still have a lot of followers.

But I do appreciate the fact that the happy people do no research about happiness because they are happy (and mostly don’t read because reading creates new experiences and people who search for interesting rather than happy are the ones are more open to new experiences). And unhappy people love the happiness research. So I am a maven of unhappiness and the research to alleviate it.

And I can tell you that you should put a happy smile photo of yourself on twitter because Christakis says that you will be more influential on networks.

And, if you are trying to figure out what to spend your time on twitter doing, think about this, from Christakis:

We found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

This means that all those people on twitter who are trying to sell stuff to create an alternative revenue source in their lives (which I estimate to be an unfortunate 95% of all people on twitter) should think about using twitter to make happy friends, instead.

4. Be black on twitter
For the last year, I have been bombarding Brazen Careerist’s community manager, Ryan Paugh with my observations about the trending topics. They are always full of black people. But if I looked at my list of followers, I’d think there are almost no black people on twitter. And if I only read trending topics, I’d think twitter was mostly a black person thing.

Whenever I’m bored at night, (and I’ve worn out my weekly limit on impulsive eBay shopping),  I click the trending topics on twitter. I am not alone in this. Other white people write about their fascination with late-night trending topics from black people.

For those of you who don’t know what trending topics is, here’s an explanation from Farhad Manjoo who wrote a great piece about being black on twitter for Slate:

On Twitter, people append hashtags to categorize their messages—the tags make it easier to search for posts on a certain topic, and they can sometimes lead to worldwide call-and-response conversations in which people compete to outdo one another with ever more hilarious, bizarre, or profane posts.

So, anyway, last weekend, I clicked on the trending topic #ghettocompanies

I click on stuff like this because I can tell it’s going to be a conversation that is one that I would never find myself at in real life, but online, I can lurk. Here are some good one’s:

Yes, these examples reinforce stereotypes. I know; it reminds me of how my family sits around telling Jewish jokes that reinforce stereotypes, but we don’t care because we are Jewish.

But back to the how to be great at twitter part of this post. The reasons these trending topics do so well on twitter is that the groups of people who are using them are tightly knit. This information comes from Brendan Meeder, who appears to be getting a PhD from Carnegie Mellon by publishing information about how black people use Twitter.

Tightly knit groups of people retweet each other and they participate in each other’s games. This is true of lots of groups on twitter—it’s a very cliquey environment. But what’s interesting is that black people are more tightly aligned than white people. That’s why they dominate on the trending topics, according to Meeder and Manjoo.

This actually makes sense. And now, I am wondering if it’s okay to tread on racist territory too make the following analogy: There is also evidence that black people are more tightly knit than white people in prison.

I was doing research on prison violence (these  are my two pet topics for late-night research: prison violence and plane crashes. I hope there’s a special Jeopardy for these topics. I will be a millionaire.)

Anyway, prison violence is skyrocketing, and prisoners in the U.S. receive unwanted sexual advances 80,000 times per day. But the population most likely to be raped are white men under the age of 25. Of course, all men under the age of 25 are prime targets because young men are hotter than old men. But white men are more vulnerable because if a black man rapes a black man, the black prisoners will attack him. The same is true with Latino men. And if a black man rapes a Latino man or a Latino rapes a black, the men who are the same race as the victim will seek revenge. But the white people are not used to thinking of themselves in terms of race. So white men do not protect other white men.

Now I’m really on a tangent, but I can’t resist telling you. This usually starts happening in a low-security prison where guards are trying to figure out what a prisoner will be like and where to send him. The non-violent white criminals get pounced on right away. The trauma of rape makes a person start looking crazy, and then they get put in a high security prison because they are acting crazy. And in a high security prison a young, non-violent prisoner is dead meat.

Okay. So I’m a little worried about this last piece of advice, which is, in case we’ve lost focus, to act like you’re black on twitter so that people participate in your stuff and you participate in other peoples’ stuff and you have a tight-knit group.

I think people will say this is racist. But what I really want is a conversation about it. So I’m taking a risk. And maybe this is the real piece of advice. Take a risk with twitter. Try doing something with it that maybe pushes you a little outside your comfort zone. That is the way to make life the most interesting from twitter, and maybe that’s all we can ask from any technology.

My parents only realized in April of my senior year, when my friends were getting early admissions to Stanford and Brown, that I had not applied anywhere but Vassar.

I got rejected. So my parents pulled strings and gave a big donation, and I got into their alma mater, Brandeis. During the McCarthy era, Brandeis was a haven for left-wing professors who scared everyone else. By the time I got there, in the '80s, Brandeis was a haven for smart, Jewish New Yorkers who did not quite make it into the Ivy League, and wanted a haven from the semi-adult world that did not function like Jewish summer camp.

I did not fit in well, but of course, all the kids that did not fit in well somehow ended up hanging out with each other. My freshman year roommate, for example, had Asperger’s. (What luck!) My junior year roommate was just realizing that he was gay, and he thought he was being taken over by the devil. I told him being gay is fine, and that if anything, the devil is working though his dad, whose job was to ensure that Camel sold ten billion gazillion cigarettes to kids by using their icon properly.

All normal kids are the same, and all kids who are weird are weird in different ways, but the common thread through the weird kids at Brandeis was that they all read the New York Times. I had never seen that newspaper until I went to Brandeis. I’m not sure it was worth $40,000 a year, but to learn to read the New York Times when you are young is, actually, a great step toward being successful in adult life.

One of the most eye-opening parts of the paper was William Safire’s column, On Language. I grew up in a family of doctors and lawyers, so I never considered that writing was something an adult did with any seriousness, but I found myself doing writerly things in secret, and reading William Safire was a part of that.

His column was mostly about how dynamic language is. He knew tons about language, but he never snubbed his nose when people did not use language in a conventional way. I learned from him that it’s just not that interesting to be the language police; it’s more interesting to be the language philosopher. I also learned from his column that it’s interesting to watch language evolve, because language is the visible result of underlying changes in our society.

Which leads me to the word fuck. I use it very infrequently in this blog, because I think makes for uninteresting writing—there’s always a more precise way to express dismay, and precision is interesting to read. But in real life, I say fuck all the time.

I did not have any trouble with this before I had kids. In general, though, I tell the kids that fuck is an adult word, and they can’t use it. (My son asked if he could use fuck when he is old enough to quit violin lessons. I said yes, although tentatively because I hate to have the day he can quit violin lessons be the marker of when the world gets great.)

No one had ever told me that my using the word fuck was offensive, so I never thought about it much. Until I met the farmer.

The farmer had never heard anyone use fuck in everyday conversation. I thought he was sheltered, so I basically ignored his request to stop saying fuck. But then, I was talking with the contractors who were working on our house, and I said fuck, and they nearly fell off their chairs.

“See,” the farmer said later, “I told you. People never say that word around here.  They couldn’t believe you said it. Right there. In your very own kitchen.”

The thing is, I think fuck is like dick. And I never say the word dick. I mean, I can write it, but really, I can’t say it. And the farmer actually said to my kids, “Try peeing out of the hole in the barn. It’s fun. Just point your dick in the middle so the pee doesn’t bounce back at you.”

I said, “What? You cannot use the word dick with the kids!”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“It’s crass. And kids should learn the proper names for talking about their bodies.”

“Hold it. You are telling me that I’m crass?”

I knew he was talking about fuck. He just can’t say it. I thought about it. I said, “I think it’s just cultural, because, really, fuck is slang for something that is perfectly fine to say, and dick is the same way.”

So we agreed that he will use language that I think is crass, because I think it’s fun. And I will refrain from using fuck.

Then I came across some other information about swearing. There is research from Yehuda Baruch, professor of management at University of East Anglia that swearing at work helps build teamwork. And Timothy Jay, professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, finds that using taboo words is a good stress reliever. In his paper,  Ubiquity and Utility of Taboo Words, surveys show that when we are upset, instead of restraining our language to vent, we actually do feel better when we swear.

(I told this to the farmer, and he made me realize that since I say fuck every day, I’d have to say something like god fucking dammit in order to release tension.)

William Safire helps me to understand that the farmer’s intolerance for fuck is not provincial. Well, maybe provincial, but also interesting.

The farmer also says things like “Whaddyou got goin?” as opposed to “What are you doing today?” And he uses double negatives like, “I’m not doin nothin about that,” which he did not start using until we had been dating a while, so clearly he knows when to shut it off. But I don’t like him shutting down his dialect.

It’s dialect, right? Or vernacular. I am not sure I know how to use either of these words, but I’m sure that it’s interesting to hear people use my language in new ways.

There is vernacular for photos, as well. My friends come to the farm and take pictures of cuteness, like this one, from Caitlin:

But when the farmer takes pictures of pigs, he shows clinical details, that non-farmers don't necessarily see.

I did not notice the difference in visual language until I started looking closely at photos for posting on my blog. But it was a pleasant surprise.

I told the farmer I was going to write this post. Mostly to give him warning that he was going to go nuts that I wrote a post with ten fucks in it. But I said, “I’m a little nervous about writing about William Safire," which was also true.

The farmer said, “Why?”

I said, “He’s so old. I mean, he’s not old. He’s dead. And he’s really from an older era. I want people to think I’m young and fun.”

“What do you mean, young and fun?”

“I guess I mean fuckable.”

“What? Why do you have to use that word?”

“Because sometimes fuck is just the right word. Think about it. Tell me when you think of a word you can use to replace fuckable.”

And I think he’s still thinking.

(For readers who did not see the article, I like it. Here's a link. And, sidenote, the author, Louette Harding, was so good at interviewing – so patient and so insightful and I wish I could talk with her every day. But maybe that's just because we talked about me and this is just evidence that I am really hard to be friends with.)

If you are here for the first time, here are some shortcuts to posts I've written about having Asperger's syndrome:

Why I need a sick day to register my car

Five ways to be less annoying

5 Ways to make telecommuting better

Why I'm difficult at meetings

How I deal with sensory integration dysfunction

Really, though, almost all of this blog is about having Asperger's syndrome because most of my writing is me trying to figure out the rules for succeeding in the workplace. I know that people say I have an odd take on the rules, but I think I'm usually right, I'm just more literal and more blunt than most people.

Here are some examples:

Don't report sexual harassment

Hold CEOs accountable for their bad parenting

Living up to your potential is B.S.

Thanks for visiting my blog.

It is useless to try to explain to him why Home Depot tile is not innovative design. He doesn’t care. He just wants to be clean. I used to think diversity was my best friend marrying a black guy. But the guy graduated from rich-kid private schools and has tenure at UCLA and, at this point, I think diversity is not skin color but rather social upbringing.

I noticed there’s a lot of information on how to create diversity, but there’s not a lot of information about how to cope with it once you have it. So here are my tips:

1. Accept that some people don’t care about what you care about.
It’s true that we have not been very clean during the remodeling. All the plumbing is on hold. We take showers under the spigot for the well, and I keep thinking a towel is dirty, and put it in the dirty laundry, and then a week later it looks relatively clean, so I use it.

The farmer is concerned that people will think we don’t wash. He says people in the country judge you by whether you’re clean. This is the hardest part of remodeling for him.

The hardest part for me was painting because everyone besides my designer, Maria Killam, told me that it's a sin to paint woodwork. I painted anyway.

The painters were so offended by the idea of painting woodwork that after they did the whole upstairs they asked if I changed my mind because they could still leave the woodwork downstairs unpainted.

Also: The painters wouldn’t paint the pink bedroom until the farmer expressly approved, in person, the color of paint.  (His commentary: “Don’t call me in from the field to look at paint again, okay?”)

2. Know when you have to get your way.
What we ended up with are colors that make me happy and creative.

In fact, these are the same colors I chose for my childhood bedroom. My parents were so sure that I’d hate the colors when I went through puberty that they bought everything really cheap. But I never stopped loving my bright blue carpet. (Even now I remember the crayon I used to pick the carpet color: Cornflower blue.)

3. Don’t try to change others. See the world differently yourself.
I was going to go for farmhouse chic decor. But only non-farmers like farmhouse chic: you don't need an old bench in your house when you have four in your barn. So I decided that steampunk is a better look for me, and maybe I should sell our old barn boards – which I constantly rescue from the farmer’s bonfires – to the farm-fetish people of New York City.

4. Seek out opposing views, just to practice processing them.
Oh. Wait. Speaking of New York City, when I tell a New Yorker that I live on a farm, do you know what they ask? “How many bedrooms is the house?” Like all houses are weekend houses on the Hudson.  And do you know what Wisconsin natives ask when I tell them I live on a farm? “Do you burn couches?” It’s so common for farmers to burn furniture in their yard that people in Wisconsin know which furniture makes the best fire. (Yes, we did, in fact, burn furniture. But I didn’t realize it until my nanny asked if she could have the dresser we’re not using, and the farmer said, “It was cheap wood, anyway.”)

5. Use innocuous obsessions to distract from genuine conflict.
While I’ve been waiting to unpack, I have been gardening — adding plants the Amish farmer down the highway has on sale because it's too late in the summer to plant them.

Also while I've been waiting to unpack, I have been sort of unpacking. Going through books. I always try to throw some books out when I move because I have too many. In my 20s, my walls were covered in books. But once I realized that living a life buried in books is a sign of dysfunction, I’ve been trying to cut back. I still am not able to read a book from the library. I have to own it. But I am able to throw out a book if I no longer remember anything about it.

6. There's relief: A new, jarring way of thinking becomes tame over time.
I read Fear of Flying the first year out of college, and then I realized I was missing a whole part of the literary canon, so I spent a year reading the history of women writing about sex. It was an eye-opening year, but twenty years later, the books are not as challenging. I throw out almost all the books, but I save:

Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong

The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

My Secret Garden, by Nancy Friday

The Story of O, by Pauline Reage

Then I got worried that the town is so small that everyone watches what everyone throws out, and people will not appreciate the literary aspects of books like House of Incest.

I told the farmer that he should be careful bringing the box to the dump because some people would think it’s porn.

“Oh, really?” was all he said. And he moved those books a little bit away from the trash pile.

Then I noticed the books were making their way slowly, one by one, to our pink bedroom.

7. Real diversity requires real patience.
The tile is not the only thing holding us up. Also the faucets. Which the farmer assumed was the contractor’s fault and not mine because what sane woman would wash dishes in an outside well for eight weeks on her own volition?

“Actually,” I say, “I need brass polished finish for the s-trap, and I have had a hard time finding it.”

The farmer tries very hard to understand why a nickel finish on the pipes would not be steampunky-y enough for my farmhouse kitchen. “I hate to end up with a kitchen that is actually ironic commentary on our farm life instead of insightful commentary.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“It’s why I need brass pipes instead of nickel. Steampunk is insightful commentary on vintage decorating.”

The farmer hugs me. He knows I’m onto something, and maybe he can wait another week. Or three.

We go up to the bedroom. We knock over the stack of maybe-porn and we bump into the chandelier so hard that it sounds like wind chimes. We pull off the duvet that I had to travel to New York City to find, and just as the farmer is about to go down on me he says, “What’s this?”

“What?”

“There’s dirt.”

“Really?”

“How do you get dirt in your underwear? Were you gardening nude or something? How does this happen?”

I think about the dirty towel getting me dirty instead of dry. I think the farmer is not going to want to hear that we have no shower and no washing machine and no end in sight. So I say, “Yeah. I think it’s gardening.” And somehow, he’s relieved.