The NFL has finally admitted the problem, to the extent it is poised to be the largest funding source for research about trauma to the brain. But still, the game encourages brain trauma. And people cheer.

I can understand if it’s like smoking. You’re addicted, you can’t stop. But what about bringing your kids to the game? What about all the people who make the Superbowl a family TV event? Kids who play football in high school are more likely to die from that than drunk driving or guns. And parents encourage their kids to play this sport?

The culture of football amazes to me — the incredible level of denial. So what I'm thinking is that people are delusional. And they know it, but they keep going. They cultivate delusion.

That's what I think of when I hear about the HBO documentary about Temple Grandin. She's a total freak. This is why she’s interesting. Because people love an underdog—people love seeing weirdness succeed because most people feel weird and they worry it’s going to hold them back.

The problem is that a little weird is normal, but Temple is weird in a way that makes her a statistical improbability. Unlike Temple, most people with Asperger Syndrome are very smart but cannot hold down a job. Most Asperger people are living at the edge of poverty. They divorce at very high rates, and they are at high risk for depression and suicide.

Journalists who interact with Temple say that, on a personal level, she is absolutely impossible to deal with on a regular basis. This is not surprising. (Being difficult is what Asperger’s is about, in a large way. Everyone tries to isolate themselves from things that drive them crazy. Someone with Asperger Syndrome just has a much longer list with a much lower threshold in the you-are-driving-me-crazy department.) So it's lucky that she is an absolute genius in a field that has very little competition from people with good social skills. Most people with Asperger’s, even if they are geniuses at, say, engineering (which is very common) get in trouble mid-career for lack of social skills.

I hate the glorification of abnormal. People who are abnormal have an enormous struggle to find a place in the world. It’s not fun or glamorous. The celebration of abnormal is a delusional luxury of the relatively normal population.

More about the world of delusion: Time magazine reports that 78% women feel that media does not accurately represent women with kids.

Probably the most accurate representation of women is in the blogosphere. There is no filter here, no need to appeal to both Peoria and Pasadena all at once. But even the whole of the blogosphere does not represent the female experience particularly accurately.

Here’s how I know: I compare the traffic for dooce.com and thepioneerwoman.com.

The Pioneer Woman is largely housewife porn. The men are hot and rugged, just like in a romance novel. The author, Ree Drummond, is running an operation similar to Rachel Ray or Martha Stewart, but she markets herself as a stay-at-home mom, and a homeschooler at that. The whole thing strikes me as totally preposterous. It’s as impossible as Friends, where everyone had a pricey NYC apartment, and not-high-paying job. But regardless, The Pioneer Woman’s traffic is absolutely through the roof, proving the appeal of preposterous escapism.

Dooce, on the other hand, is more gritty, and has about half the traffic of Pioneer Woman. On Dooce, Heather Armstrong blogs about depression, her kids being difficult, and her parents being Mormon. I love Heather Armstrong. But she’s the gold standard for writing a blog about your life and keeping a marriage together, and she is not, actually, writing about the female experience for married women.

Here is the female experience for married women (from a survey from PayPal):

37% of arguments are about money

24% are about household chores

15% are about in-laws

13% are about sex

Heather does not write about any of these arguments, except, maybe, chores. So who is writing about these fights? Where is the blogger explaining how she got through these fights?

I think the truth is that women don’t want to see themselves reflected back to them. Family life is messy right now. No one would aspire to have the life the baby boomer women had; people won’t even use the word feminist any more. And Generation X women, after creating the first fertility crisis in history by putting off kids for work, realized that they’d rather be home with kids than work full-time. So Gen X doesn’t want to look in the mirror. It’s too painful.  Gen Y looks ahead and has no role model that looks appealing.

At first I was going to tell you how everyone who watches football and Temple Grandin are delusional. But I guess I am, too, because I read Pioneer Woman and Dooce all the time. And I like it.

But mindfulness goes a long way. For example,  if you carry a book on your head every day for ten minutes, you will actually have more self-discipline to do the stuff in your life that matters more than a book on your head. It might seem like just a funny example, but don’t underestimate how hard it is to get yourself to keep a book on your head for ten minutes each day.

I think this works with facing reality, too. Maybe if we do it daily, in some aspect of our life, we get the temerity to implement that discipline in other parts of life as well. But we have to start somewhere in order to battle the magnetism of delusion.

It's easy to call out other peoples' delusions. It matters much more to call out our own.

Comment on: Check-up for self-delusion

I asked the farmer if rodeos are bad for the animals.

He said, “City people probably think so. But most farmers don’t.”

He told me that if I really hated it, we could leave.

I really hated it before there were any animals. Before there were animals there was the flag, rising above the dirt ring, and the announcer saying everyone should sing the Star Spangled Banner to honor “the flag that protects our troops, and our churches and our great country.”

I looked over at the farmer for churches, and before I could roll my eyes, the announcer said, “Everyone please rise in the name of Jesus and sing the Star Spangled Banner.”

I told my kids to stay seated.

The farmer stayed seated out of solidarity even though he hates standing out. It was a great moment of compromise for us.

We watched the rodeo. There was a clown. The kids did not quite know what was going on and they wanted to know why the cowboys had weird clothes. But then Ronald McDonald came out — right into the bull ring. The kids recognized him immediately, and then they realized the clown was not a cowboy; with Ronald McDonald present, the world seemed to fall into place.

Then out came the animals.

In between cowboys falling violently to the ground, the announcer would say jokes like, “My girlfriend says she wants to get married. I told her I hope she finds someone nice.”

The theme of the evening, in general, was “real men get thrown off bulls and treat women like crap.”

Until the women came out. They were acrobats on fast running horses. Sort of like the clowns, only dressed like Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. The most special time, I think, was when two girls did tricks on one horse. The girls did not share a horse because the tricks are more difficult that way, it was more like the girls shared a horse to make you think they'd be available for a threesome after the show.

Luckily, this was lost on my sons. And the farmer acknowledged that this was not a family values kind of thing.

Okay. So we stayed. And then, the clown started talking about doctors. He said there are 120,000 doctors in the US and there are 70,000 accidental deaths a year. And there are 80 million gun owners in the US, and there are 12,000 accidental deaths a year. Then he shouted out, “So doctors are more dangerous than guns! So Washington, keep your hands off our guns and our health care!”

I looked at the kids. They were concentrating on their popcorn.

Then, out of nowhere, the clown brought out a wig, that had dreadlocks, and he put on a Rastafarian hat, and he started pretending that he was Barack Obama. He said, "I feel so presidential." And he made jokes about whether Obama is a US citizen.

Why am I telling you this?

First of all, it made me feel lonely. I have heard the doctor/gun owner argument before, but not in a stadium, in Madison, WI, which is one of the most left-leaning cities in the country. And I know there is racism in this country. But I can’t believe that not a single person in that stadium yelled out anything after a racist joke. I would expect, actually, that people would boo and hiss and throw things into the ring. But no one said a word.

I felt lonely that I live in a city where this could happen. I wish I could find a place where I feel like I fit in. I think I find it, and then I don’t. And really, how could I even think that I’d fit in at a rodeo? But I kind of thought the place would be full of people like me and the farmer. Now I think I don’t even know what that means.

Another reason the rodeo makes me sad is that McDonald’s sponsors it. My ticket stub says “All-Star Rodeo Challenge. Pre-show: McDonald’s Cowboys 4 Kids”. Somehow the whole thing is more upsetting because it’s sanctioned by McDonald’s. And they know better.

My company, Brazen Careerist, just launched a company section in our social network. The reason we did that is because according to Cone, 50% of generation Y communicate with companies through social media. And Jeremy Owyang, from Forrester Research reports that, "In approximately two years social networks will be more powerful than corporate web sites. Brands will serve community interests and grow based on community advocacy."

Today, young people see corporate brands as an extension of their identity—this is why Facebook has been so successful with corporate fan pages – young people want to express themselves by linking themselves to corporate brands they like.

And, people who manage their careers well end up paying more attention to a company’s reputation for caring about people and community than what any given job description is. After all, a job description can change the day you walk in the door, but how a company participates in the world around it is not likely to change quickly.

Okay. So. I confess to being relatively close to the McDonald’s brand. I didn’t use to be. I never ate at McDonald’s in my life until I moved to Madison. But in Madison, it’s a long, cold winter, and McDonald’s has great indoor playgrounds, all over the Madison area. And each is different and fun in it’s own way. So we tour them all winter.

Also, now that I understand the beef industry a little better, I understand that McDonald’s single handedly cornered the beef industry, yes, but also listened to consumer outcry over animal conditions, and meat quality, and improved both (by hiring Temple Grandin)

So I like McDonald’s. But today, I can tell you that if I had a job at McDonald’s, I’d be lonely. Because they sponsored an event that teaches kids prejudice and hate and racism. And if companies want to attract good employees, they need to be good corporate citizens. Those are the type of companies we want to work for.

One of the most important changes in work life is that we do not define our career by working for one company—we change jobs too frequently. Today, we define ourselves by the integrity with which we manage our career. That requires working with companies we respect. The integrity of individual companies matters more today than it used to—it affects the bottom line for those companies on both the consumer side and the employee side. We watch corporate brands closely, to see how we will use them to extend our own brand.

Finally, since it’s Martin Luther King Day, and since Psychology Today just published a study that says people feel better if they do an act of activism, I have a proposal:

We should each twitter today:

@McDonalds Racism is not okay and neither is hate. Please stop your support of the All-Star Rodeo. http://bit.ly/4AiXT1

UPDATE! Here's a response from McDonald's:

Hi Penelope,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This appears to be a local pre-show program in support of a local Ronald McDonald House Charities fundraiser. Rest assured, McDonald's does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. We are currently looking into this matter.

Jessica Thompson

Manager, U.S. Communications

McDonald's USA

Comment on: Martin Luther King Day Special: Racism is alive and kicking. (Hello, McDonald's)

I know your first inclination is to say that I’m an idiot for waiting until the end of November. But I really, really cannot deal with bureaucracy. To give you a sense of how much I can’t deal with it, I almost did not graduate college because I had too many library fines. I graduated only because my grandma made some calls.

I have found, in adult life, that bureaucracy only gets deeper and deeper, and for someone like me, with Asperger Syndrome, the rules, numbers and conversations that bureaucracy entails is completely overwhelming: IRS, health insurance, 401Ks, I actually have no idea how people cope with this stuff.

Which brings me to the DMV, to register my car, the day my sticker expires.

I have to fill in my age on the form, but there are numbers all over the form and all over the room and I can’t remember if I’m 41 or 42. I know the math problem is 2009 – 1966, but it would require borrowing and carrying,  I think, because the 9 is so much bigger than the 0 and that’s where they will line up: the 9 under the 0. The numbers on top always feel like they are flying and I can’t keep track of them and I’ll never get the math problem right. At least not right now. So I guess.

I tell the DMV lady I filled out my form.

She looks to see if I filled in everything.

She says that I left the second part blank.

This is true. It looked like it was too much. Like, how could they want all that information? I just can’t believe it.

She says, “You need your VIN, color, make, date purchased and your signature.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Do you have it?”

“I forgot the car title stuff at my house. Can you look it up?”

“You came to register your car without the vehicle identification number?”

“Oh. Um. I thought I had it.”

I have to go home.

This is not easy. I can’t read a map, and I don’t know left and right, so I can’t follow verbal directions, so I have three routes I know well in Madison, and if I’m trying to get anywhere, I try to get to one of my three routes. For me, it’s not about the fastest route, it’s about not having to follow a new one.

But I’m on the side of town I never go to, so I can’t figure out how to get to one of my routes. I think I have a straight shot to my office, though. So I tell myself I’ll go to my office and then I’ll do my regular drive home, and get the title.

But I get lost going to my office. I would usually call Ryan Paugh for something like this but he’s on vacation. I review the social norms I know about vacations: usually, if someone is your friend, you can call them for help on vacation. But Ryan probably only helps me because I’m sort of his boss.

So I get lost going to my office, and then I go home, and then I take the same route back to the DMV, but it’s so long that I decide to stop at my favorite gas station.

It’s my favorite gas station for the coffee. Have I told you that now that I live in Wisconsin I have taken to drinking gas station coffee? I don’t know what’s come over me. So my favorite meal right now is French Vanilla coffee and a Peanut Butter Power Bar.

I have told you before that transitions are insanely difficult for me. This is one of those times. I am eating—so nice and easy—and going back to the DMV seems so terrible, and isn’t going to ever work out anyway. So I get another coffee and another Power Bar. And it’s so nice, sitting in my car, alone, with no noise, and I think I’m going to die if I have to go back to the DMV.

I do not die, but I do get anxiety and start picking at my cuticles. I have Googled a million times to see if picking cuticles is associated with Asperger’s because it’s insane that I do it. I mean, it hurts and everyone can see it, and sometimes, if it’s a really bad day, I get blood on a nice shirt. Which is today. Well, not really a nice shirt because I was so stressed about today that I did not change out of the shirt I slept in. But I am bleeding.

The only thing I found out from Google is that people with Asperger’s self-mutilate as a way to focus away from what is overwhelming. So it’s like cutting. That’s what’s going on here. I find Googling that another form of this sort of self-mutilation is anorexia, which I wish so much I could have.

Do not tell me this is not acceptable to say. It’s always the fat people who say that. Because really everyone wishes they could be anorexic for a few days, just to get their weight down. I’m just wishing I could be anorexic for the days that I’m picking at my cuticles. The food thing is so much more socially acceptable.

I bring my VIN number to the window where the lady is.

She says, “Hello again.”

Really. She says this. And I can only think of that part of the book Go Dog Go where the dogs say:

Hello again.

Hello.

Do you like my hat?

I do not.

Goodbye again.

Goodbye.

I always liked that part because I felt like Go Dog Go doesn't just have work dogs and play dogs, and up dogs and down dogs. Go Dog Go also has Asperger’s dogs.

So I say, “Hello.”

I hope we are going to do the Go Dog Go script. I’m giddy with anticipation of having a real connection with the DMV lady.

She says, “Do you have proper identification now?”

I panic. I was expecting “Do you like my hat?” I thought she only needed the car stuff. I worry she needs a phone bill with my address on it or something.

I show her my stuff. She helps me fill in the form. She talks slowly for me, and it’s comforting.

She gives me a number and tells me to wait until it’s called.

I look around for people looking at numbers being called. I don’t see a crowd of people holding papers like mine.

Also, I hear a lot of stuff being called. I mean, there’s the Wisconsin ID department, and the driver’s license department, and the car registration people, and you can even get a passport photo taken here. There’s a lot going on. There are a lot of numbers here.

I worry that I’m going to miss my number while I’m trying to figure things out. So I go back to the woman and ask her how long she thinks it’ll be.

She says, “Not long at all.”

I say, “Not long like an hour, or not long like a minute?”

She says, “Five minutes.”

I go back to looking for where people are listening to numbers. I tell myself I have four minutes to figure out where the numbers are coming from. I look around and the place is full of sixteen-year-olds who are handling all the paperwork for their driver’s licenses. Their parents are reading books, taking care of young siblings, not paying attention to the forms and the numbers and the lines. The sixteen-year-olds are doing it.

Is this the DMV for the gifted-and-talented? Is it normal that all these teens can navigate the DMV? How do they know what to do? Where do they get their information?

I cannot figure out who is supposed to call my number. I am not hearing numbers. I so so so do not want to go back to the woman at the desk. I stare at the wall trying to figure out what to do.

The wall at the DMV is, actually, overwhelming. There are videos about immigration and posters about drunk driving, and there are LCD displays of numbers and letters and I have to find the only blank spot on the wall, in between the bathroom doors, to stare.

I tell myself that it will be fine to ask the lady at the window for help again. I remind myself about the airport. For years I was too scared to ask for help at the airport even though I could not read my boarding pass. I missed so many flights that Ryan Healy was not even surprised anymore when I called him from an airport to tell him I was stuck. Sometimes I’d be right there, sitting at the gate, watching the clock, but the clock is just more numbers, and still I’d miss the flight. Or, if I did not miss my flight, it took so much concentration that I would lose all my stuff; there's too much commotion to navigate for me to also read numbers.

So I started asking the person at the counter to circle the gate and the time on my boarding pass. I say, “I’m dyslexic and I can’t read my boarding pass.” The person always has a moment of surprise but usually they watch out for me.

So I pretend I’m at the airport and I go to the DMV lady again. I say, “Can you tell me what to do with this? I can’t figure out how to know where to go with my number.”

She says, “What number?”

I hand her my slip.

She says, “These are all letters.”

I look. And it’s true. They are. But they are tricky letters for someone thinking numbers. Well, the H is not tricky, but the I and the O really threw me off.

I say thank you, and then I see there is an LCD above each window in the whole place that shows the number and letter sequence that is almost like mine but not really mine.

I watch. And then it’s my turn.

I go up to the counter. The woman looks over my form.

I am so nervous that I’m not going to have the right information that I have to look away. I look at the customer at the window next to me.

She has a folder of information. Everyone has folders for their car stuff? How can the whole world be so organized? How can the government require that you be this organized to get through life? Why is no one protesting?

My new DMV lady looks up stuff in the computer. She tells me I have a ticket.

This does not surprise me. I get tickets a lot and I forget to pay them. So I sort of think of all tickets, when I get them, as the amount on the slip plus the inevitable late fee.

I say, “Can I pay it now?”

She says, “No. You need to pay at the police station at the Capitol.”

I don’t know why I say this, because just getting the words out gives me so much stress that I think I’m going to have diarrhea right there on the spot. But I say, “Can I go pay it at the police station and then come back?”

“No. It takes up to seven days to clear in the system.”

“What?”

“The system here needs to show you have no tickets before I can register your car.”

So I settle in for a week of surreptitious, unregistered driving while I wait for the system to clear.

Luckily this is not a day I have to drive to the farm. The farmer drives to my  house.

And right when I am trying to get dinner on the table, he says, “Do you have a stamp?”

My first thought is, “It's so annoying that are you are talking to me when I am trying to get dinner ready because it’s too hard for me to do dinner and kids and stamps.” Also, I think, “Who is still using stamps? What do we need stamps for in 2009 besides letters to Santa?”

He says, “I got a ticket today for parking in front of your house, and I want to pay it before I forget.”

Then I put down my pot, turn off the stove and walk over to give him a kiss. The important thing when you have Asperger’s is not to be able to do stuff you can’t do, but to surround yourself with people who can.

Comment on: Asperger's at work: Why I need a sick day to register my car

The absurdity of the workplace being set up for extroverts is that 57% percent of the world are introverts, according to Laurie Helgoe, a psychologist and the author of the book Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength.

A lot of people tell me that my posts about how to approach social situations if you have Asperger Syndrome are helpful to people who are introverts. That might be true, in that both types of people need to limit their exposure to social situations. But the difference is that people with Asperger’s are disabled socially. People who are introverts could be great in social situations.

So you can’t judge yourself by whether or not you are socially competent. Rather, if you have the choice to be in a social situation or be alone, which would you choose more often? An introvert has more energy for doing life if he or she gets time alone, to recharge. An extrovert gets recharged from being around people. (Here’s a test to take if you’re not sure what you are.)

I am not an introvert. (I’m an ENTJ.) But I have sensory integration dysfunction, which gives me a similar feeling to introverts when they are overwhelmed with outside input. So unlike most ENTJs, I have a soft spot for introverts. And I am realizing that introversion is an important thing to have in a workplace – the trick is having introverts that understand why they’re so valuable.

Here are five ways to leverage the advantages of introversion:

1. Work in the world of ideas.
Introverts generally love to talk about ideas, according to Helgoe. She says that in conversation, introverts are stronger if you talk about “what are you thinking?” instead of “what are you doing?” And at work, you are stronger if you are helping people with ideas rather than sticking to a routine pattern of work.

2. Give ten minutes and then go.
Make a  connection, really contribute to the conversation, and then ten minutes is enough. Also, Helgoe says extroverts often have anxiety that they cannot get access to the introverts in their life – because they are always leaving to be alone. Introverts can alleviate this problem by being fully attentive for a short time and then leaving.

3. Have confidence in your self-knowledge.
Do you know the personality type that has the longest Wikipedia page? INTJ. Because the combination of being an introvert and being idea-driven makes one very interested in learning about oneself. INTJs are extreme cases, but all introverts have this combination to some extent, and the self-knowledge will help you to put yourself in situations where you’ll have the most positive impact. For example, Helgoe has a great chapter on how to get out of going to a party – a key skill for an introvert, who does better in very small groups.  But the bottom line is that you have to say that you’d rather be alone, which, Helgoe points out, “requires a real grounding in who you are."

4. Teach other people to interact with you.
A lot of the conflict Ryan Healy and I used to have is that I had no idea how to communicate with an introvert. The biggest difference is that I think out loud, so I never stop talking to think. Ryan thinks and then talks. But if I never shut up, he can’t actually think long enough to have a response. He did a bunch of research about communication styles and he taught me this difference between us. It helped me a lot to make space so that we could have a productive conversation.  (Here’s a book that can help you teach people how to approach introversion, and here's a summary of the book.)

5. Take control of your work.
One of the most popular professions for introverts is being a writer. What this means is that there is a lot of information written about what work is well-suited for an introvert.  Here is a list of ways to make an office that will help introverts excel.

And, I’m going to end by telling you to check out the book I recommend more than any other book in the world: Do What You Are by Paul Tieger. This book does not provide a single list of jobs suitable to introverts because there are so many different types of introverts. But this book can tell you what sort of introvert you are (for example, an artist or an activist?) and what sort of work you will thrive in.

As for you extroverts, stop assuming everyone is like you, and start tailoring conversation to introverts when it's appropriate. Once I understood the different types of personalities, I started doing much better at work.

Comment on: Leverage the advantages of being an introvert at work

I have written before that for me, the biggest problem at work stems from my own sensory integration dysfunction – something that typically tags along with an Asperger's diagnosis. But for someone with Asperger's, it's not enough to deal with sensory integration dysfunction; in order to succeed at the workplace, you need some guidelines for bridging the gap between other peoples' social skills and your own.

So, based on my own experience, here are some concrete rules for doing better at work if you have Asperger’s, and maybe if you don’t.

1. Spend limited amounts of time with people.
One of the things that is alarming to non-Asperger’s people is how few friends and relationships people with Asperger’s have. But I have never heard anyone with Asperger’s lament this. (Temple Grandin is a good example.) It’s not something we feel a loss about. We only need a small amount of closeness in our life. What I do hear Asperger’s people sad about all the time is a lack of employment opportunity.

The way to improve this is to spend less time with people. We can be normal in small spurts. We can look charming and quirky in small doses but in large doses, it’s overwhelming. So go out to dinner, but then go home. Go to the company picnic, but just talk with people for a little bit. Then leave.

At work you do not need to spend tons of time with people. You can be the weird, smart one. As long as you’re not too weird. Get along with people for a little. Then go back to your cube.

2. Don’t tell your boss.
People don’t care about your random, personal crap. I know, that’s crazy to say on this blog. But I’m entertaining or useful, and when I’m at my best, I’m both.  Also, your boss won’t know what to do. She can’t read 400 pages on Asperger’s.

Instead, ask your boss questions about social situations. For example, at Brazen Careerist, we just closed a small round of funding. And my boss, our new CEO, sent a thank you to the investors. I emailed him to find out: Should I send a thank you as well? And he said yes. So I did.

When you ask specific questions about social situations, your boss will appreciate that you know you don’t know.  And your boss will think you’re coachable. That helps when your boss sees you being a social moron. The biggest problem with people who have poor social skills is that they don’t know what they’re missing, so they are not coachable. You will differentiate yourself from this crowd when you ask for help.

Ryan Paugh has great social skills. So I ask him a lot of questions, and I watch him. When Ryan Healy’s parents came to visit, I knew I needed to talk with them, because I was the CEO. I know that's a social rule. But I absolutely completely could not figure out what to say. I listened to Ryan Paugh go first. He said, “What do you have planned for the weekend?”

That was a great line. I wouldn’t have thought of it. But I know for next time.

People who are typical will think this is an easy conversation to have. They’ve had it before, in another form. People with Asperger’s cannot generalize social rules. We have to learn the thing to say in every single situation.

3. Be great at what you do, and a little odd.
I write obsessively about how important it is to to be a star. It is actually more important for people with Asperger’s. This is the only way to stay employable. You will always be difficult to deal with. You need to make it worth everyone’s time.

Often, people who are really likable don’t have to be good at what they do. People just love being around them. And it’s fair, because someone who everyone likes actually does make the team more productive.

Many people who work with me know that I’m weird. The first thing Ryan and Ryan said when they got to Madison was that I am totally eccentric. They put up with it. They stayed because I have built such a good career for myself. They wanted to work with me because of that, so they excuse the poor social skills.

By the time you get to the mid-point in your career, it’s clear that the people who stand out as great at what they do are also weird, and they are thinking in odd ways. It’s what makes them stand out. So the more successful you are in your career, the more okay it is, and the more expected it should be, for you to be odd.

4. Do office politics by being totally direct.
There is office politics in every office. Because office politics is about how people get along. If you have Asperger’s, there is not a good way for you to know all the nuances—we don’t understand mean, vindictive, passive aggressive, these are all way too complicated. So we don’t do them. This should make people like us, if we do it right. Unfortunately, I've noticed that much of how I act comes off as mean, even if this is not my intention.

So you need to really look at peoples’ faces. And if you get a bad reaction when you say something, even if you think it’s not a bad thing to say, you need to stop and ask if you hurt someone’s feelings. I ask this four or five times in any given day. “Are you angry?” Most of the time people are surprised that I don’t know. But I keep asking. There is no other way to find out.

5. Don’t get frustrated by the rules.
Recently, I’ve been reminded about how hard it was to learn business rules because I had to learn dating rules. I got frustrated about dating. Like I’ll never learn. For four dates I didn’t understand why people drink on a date. I don’t understand why you don’t say at the beginning of the date if you want to have sex at the end, so you know what you’re leading to. But I tried to just do what other people are doing. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I just try to fit in.

There are rules like this for the office, as well. Just follow them. Don’t ask for any rationale. It won’t make sense. That’s okay.

Comment on: Asperger's at work: 5 ways to be less annoying

Countless studies show people would rather have pleasant and personable co-workers than a co-worker who is always right. I try to keep this in mind each day, and consequently, I spend a lot of time planning my interactions.

But sometimes my plans fail. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’m going to walk you through my most recent parent-teacher conference. Which was a disaster.  And while it was a meeting in a second-grade classroom, it could have been a meeting with anyone, anywhere.

1. I can’t tell the difference between social niceties and reality.
I think I'm late.  I am bad with transitions — I space out from the stress of change so I drive around the school a few times without noticing before I go in. I am bad with time, because I don’t totally understand how to predict what the next number will be. So sometimes I forget where I am in the hour.

But then I get to the school and I think I am early to the conference, and I go to the bathroom, because the school halls are bustling and I want calm.

I get to the room and the teacher is sitting at her desk. Doing nothing. I think this means she is waiting. So I ask if I’m late. She says no, but I am pretty sure she means yes. I know some people say the answer they think would be good manners instead of the right answer. I stare at her body language for a clue.

2. I get sidetracked by insisting on telling people what they don’t know.
I forget to listen to her talking because I’m stuck on if I’m late or not, but I perk up when she says that my son’s cursive writing is too slow and he needs to print like the rest of the class.

Because I need her to know that spending any time on kids’ handwriting is stupid.  I tell her there are no jobs that require people to have decent handwriting, and definitely no jobs—besides wedding calligrapher—that require cursive.

She thinks I'm saying kids don't need to learn to construct paragraphs, or book reports.

I try to clarify that I mean good penmanship is useless.

She says she's sorry that I am upset.

This is when I realize that I picked a fight, and parents do not pick fights with teachers unless the parents are jerks or idiots or both. And I don't even know what I'm arguing for any more. So I try to get out of the argument. I tell her that I will explain to my son that cursive writing is for at home until the rest of the class is doing it.

3. I interrupt constantly and don’t realize it.
She tells me my son is great at math. I tell her that it’s typical of boys with Asperger Syndrome to be great at math, so that’s not what I’m worried about.

I tell her I’m worried about his spelling. She tells me about his spelling and I tell her that he can spell the words he’s missing but he can’t listen and spell and write all at the same time.

I start to tell her about sensory integration disorder, but I see that I am lecturing, so I stop. And then she is hesitant to talk again. That’s when I realize that I’ve been cutting her off.

I feel terrible and tell myself I have to be a better listener. And then I start focusing on how terribly I’m doing and I forget to be a good listener. I am upset that I am offending her. I think about the  psychiatrist who says people often mistake someone with Asperger Syndrome as a narcissist. I think this is a moment when the teacher is thinking that I am totally self-absorbed and not caring at all about her.

4. My mind is too scattered to focus on being nice.
Just when I start thinking of how to care about her, she says, “in conclusion” and then I panic. I will not have time to show her I appreciate her.

I remember a photo of the Obama’s going to their parent-teacher conference and Michelle is carrying a vase of flowers. I should have brought a vase of flowers.

I try to focus.

I look at the teacher to focus on what she is saying and she is saying my son is delightful to have in class. I hear this as something she says to every parent. Then she gives me an example, which is that he is very easily redirected when he is not doing what other people are doing.

I tell her that his problem is not that he can’t be redirected. People with Asperger Syndrome are dying to please everyone around them. People with Asperger Syndrome don’t want to stand out or be the center of attention. They just want to get along with people and have things run smoothly.

So of course if she tells him what to do to fit in, he’ll do it. The problem is that he will not have someone around him for the rest of his life telling him that. I tell her it would be a positive thing if he could tell things were going badly and then he knew the right way to get help in order to make himself do what is expected.

I look at the teacher. She is clearly exhausted from dealing with me. It occurs to me that teacher conferences are only fifteen minutes. Of course we cannot cover anything significant in this time. This is a friendly, get-to-know-each-other moment. It’s a small-talk-and-smiling moment. And I should have known to ask someone to come with me, to cue me, so I would do what is expected.

Comment on: Asperger's at work: Why I'm difficult in meetings

Newsflash: No one could write in the Middle Ages, when the good writers wrote in Latin and everyone else spoke colloquial languages like French and English, which priests told them were too lame for real writing.

It’s the same situation today in that the best way to have a population of good writers is for people to write constantly, in the language that is theirs, so that they are great at expressing themselves.

People do good writing every day, in social media—when they write a note on someone’s Facebook wall, when they post a caption to a photo on flickr, or when they post a comment in a group on Brazen Careerist.

The people who are complaining that no one can write anymore are the same ones who are stressed about information overload. This is not a coincidence. Information is changing, the flow of ideas is changing, and written communication is changing with it. Information overload is the feeling of not being able to deal with this change. Young people do not feel information overload, which is another sign that they are excellent writers for the new millennium: They can process and communicate new ideas at the new pace.

I remember the first time in my life I heard about people who can’t write anymore. It was my grandma telling me to read A Little Princess, instead of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.

The people who tell you who can write and who can’t are the people who don’t want language to change. They don’t want ideas to change. They don’t want people to talk in ways that are new to them.

And now, for all you doubters, I present the research to end all research. It comes from Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She has conducted the Stanford Study of Writing, which includes about 15,000 writing samples from students from 2001 – 2006.  The always-interesting Clive Thompson reported her findings in Wired magazine:

First, only 38 percent of the writing young people do takes place in the classroom. Prior to the Internet, almost all writing people did was for the classroom. The increased amount of writing that young people do outside the classroom these days is so significant that Lumsford calls it a paradigm shift.

Second, the type of writing that students do—via IM, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth—is actually great for building communication skills.  Thompson writes that, “Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”

Third, the students have an acute sense of what good writing is because they are almost always writing for an audience. Lumsford found that students are writing mostly to debate, organize, or persuade. This is much more demanding writing than most of the writing students do for school. And, in fact, students in the Stanford study were not as enthusiastic about writing for school because they felt that the only purpose was to get a grade.

Finally, for those of you who think students don’t know how to write in full sentences, you are the people who probably don’t understand how to use text as a persuasive medium.

Lumsford finds that students are adept at making their point heard across a wide audience. And a study about Twitter, reported in Fast Company, shows that the text most likely to go viral—that is, the most persuasive text—does not have abbreviations or emoticons, the evidence most cited of a crisis in modern writing skills. Which means that students probably know intuitively to use texting slang only when texting.

Which makes me think that the people who are most worried that kids today don’t know how to write are the people who are most unable to write for an audience.

In the history of western thought, the first thing to happen when there was a paradigm shift was that the writing shifted, (Chaucer's stories of common people and Martin Luther's translations of the Bible come to mind). And the first people to complain were those who had a stake in keeping things the same. So ask yourself, do you want to be part of the next period in history, or do you want to be a person representing the futile force in history that tries to hold us back?

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I will never have great social skills, but I make them better by ensuring that I’m in my best social environment for work. For most people with Asperger’s, inadequate social skills are exacerbated by sensory integration disorder, which is a tendency to be overwhelmed by outside stimuli. This frequently overwhelmed feeling makes one unable to concentrate on social skills.

Here are the ways I compensate for sensory integration disorder so that I can focus on having social skills that will make people want to work with me.

1. Establish routines to limit input.
Food is a problem for me. I hate variety. I hate that I don’t know what is coming. My effort to control food got so extreme that I landed in a mental ward with an eating disorder. Today, I try to never go out for a meal. If I have to, I order salmon. Everywhere. And just looking for the salmon I get overwhelmed reading the menu. Too many details about food.

Given a choice, I eat a Power Bar for every meal and snack, (two= a meal, one= a snack,) and I hate if the store is out of both peanut butter and vanilla. I don’t like variety, even in Power Bars.

2. Find people who believe in you, and then reveal deficits.
I often tell people I’m booked for lunch or dinner, and suggest coffee. That way people only expect me to get a skim latte. The foam always varies, which is annoying, but I like that I always control the sugar.

Like most problems related to Asperger’s, when people know me, I am more forthcoming about the problem. This is the only way I can get help from people. For example, one of my favorite board members takes me out for breakfast each week. At first it was to control the company’s cash flow. Now it is to control for my eccentricities. He understands that I add a lot of value to the company, and he understands that I don’t eat breakfast when we go out for breakfast.

3. Assume that your most severe deficits relate to Asperger’s; you’ll understand them better.
I have math dyslexia. I don’t think people knew it existed when I was a kid. People said if I’d just do the homework then I’d be able to follow in class. But I couldn’t do the homework. Even with a tutor. By the end of high school I was in honors everything but remedial math, and still failing.

I also do not know left from right. Please, do not tell me your tricks. I know them all. For example, your left hand makes an L with your thumb and forefinger. The issue is that I don’t understand the concept of left and right: How can my left not change when I turn? How do you know my right? How can I tell which is right on the truck to my left? It all feels like a math problem to me.

4. Find people who are willing to help.
The first company I founded was, ironically, a community for math teachers. And I got killed on the financials because I didn’t ask for enough help. So with my second company, I hired a controller right away, and I spent two hours a day with her so that I’d always have a good handle on the numbers.

When I founded Brazen Careerist, I was very careful about who I partnered with because I know the gaps in my skills. Ryan Healy has a degree in finance and an ability to run numbers in his head that looks like magic to me. The first thing we did after we got our seed funding was to establish that Ryan is in charge of all the money.

Ryan Paugh has a core kindness and patience that makes me feel comfortable asking him for help in areas other people would not put up with. So, for example, I cannot read a map and I can’t follow GPS directions, so Ryan is on the phone with me all the time helping me drive to where I’m going. (“Turn to the driver’s side. The side your body is on. That side. Turn now.”) He has dealt with me crying because I turned the wrong way, even with those directions, and he has dealt with me being lost six blocks from where I grew up. Really.

5. Watch the words people use in order to see where you are distasteful.
I was always great at sports. In grade school, I was the only girl the boys let play kickball. In middle school, I was a regional figure skating champion. After college, I played professional volleyball.

But if I’m not focusing on the sport at hand, I lose track of my body. I bump into so many things that I almost always have bruises on my thighs, shins, and shoulders. This happens so routinely to me that it wasn’t until the past few years that I realized that not everyone bumps into each other, and people think I’m being inconsiderate.

I also find that I physically cut people off. Like, I jump in front of them in a way that startles them, or I walk so close to them they stop to let me pass. I can’t see how offensive I am until they are already saying “Hey! Excuse me!” but I know they mean “you are so rude.”

6. Pay more attention at work, where the judgement is most likely.
I try very hard at work to not invade peoples' personal space. This means consciously slowing down to watch where everyone’s body is before I move my own. Sometimes, if there are a lot of people moving at once, I just wait until there are fewer people moving before I move.

No one notices this, I don’t think. And when I’m very careful, I only end up bumping into people I work with once or twice a week. I don’t think they know I’m doing it. I mean, they know I’m a little jerky in how I move, but they don’t realize that I keep bumping into people.

I also try to notice if I’m standing too close to someone. And then I take some steps back. That means that people don’t know me for invading their personal space, which I know I am prone to do if I do not pay attention.

The thing is that this takes tons of mental energy. So I do not pay attention to this at all outside of work because it’s too exhausting.

7. Stick to one-on-one meetings, and use email a lot.
I don’t like crowds. They are too loud for me, and if the acoustics are bad, and it’s loud, I could actually end up in the bathroom crying from anxiety.

I can’t read nonverbal cues of more than two people at once. I can’t tell: Are they loud or quiet? Are they intimate? Are they anxious? Do they want to talk with me?

So if there are a lot of people, I either don’t shut up (because then I don’t have to do back and forth conversation) or I don’t say anything (so no one knows I’m missing cues).

I rarely go to parties. The only time I do is for work, and I usually have someone there who is translating for me. (Here is a good example of that, at SXSW.)

I am not a good collaborator in group meetings because I have to work too hard at reading people to also come up with ideas. So in groups I am either the person leading the meeting, and it’s informative rather than collaborative. I collaborate via email (finally, a good use of the “reply to all” button).

I spend most of my time one-on-one. Most people like me one-on-one because I am my most normal self. People who work with me accept that I am not my best self in big meetings and rarely invite me to them unless I’m leading them.

I know this is a lot of information for someone who is trying to deal with Asperger’s. The two most important things to take away from this are:

1.     Understand common deficits of people with Asperger’s. You probably have them.

2.     Surround yourself with people who will coach you through situations.

Comment on: Asperger syndrome in the office: How I deal with sensory integration dysfunction

Do you remember that the day started as Take Our Daughters to Work? It was the 70s, and women wanted their daughters to know that they could do anything. Here’s what came of that era: Latchkey kids who never saw their parents after school except on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. And, then later, those same little girls grew up to feel intense pressure to put work before kids which ushered in the biggest fertility train wreck in history, with Gen X thinking it would be fine to wait until after 30 to have kids.

So I have a bad taste in my mouth from the era of Take Our Daughters to Work. But then we had the era of boys underperforming. That’s right: Boys are doing so much worse than girls in school that it’s officially easier to get into college if you’re a boy (scores are lower and so are GPAs) and once these kids enter the workforce, girls make more than boys do.

So some probably-drumming, angry, white male decided that it shouldn’t just be daughters. It should be sons, too. So now we have Take Your Child to Work.

But here’s what I want to know: Why?

This holiday now strikes me as one similar to Secretaries Day, which is a relic from the days when there were no computers and secretaries had thankless jobs and the men who were having sex with them on the side always forgot to thank her in the spotlight for the typing, so there is an official reminder day to buy her a card. That made sense. Twenty years ago.

Which is why it reminds me of Take Your Child to Work Day.

You know what else reminds me of this special day? The Week of the Young Child. Seriously. It was last week. Did you celebrate? Of course you did. Because every week is the week of the young child, because if you don’t focus on young children they die. They eat bleach or get bitten by a squirrel or run over by a car.

The reason the Week of the Young Child reminds me of Take Your Child to Work Day is because, at this point, every day is taking children to work. I’m on my Blackberry all the time, and my division between work and kids is very tenuous. This is pretty common for my generation. And I think we’re pretty happy with it – or we’d stop. So it’s pretty clear to me that we don’t need a day for kids being at work because they get exposed to their parents working all the time.

And anyway, do you know how annoying kids are for people who do not have kids? It’s already totally over the top how many concessions people with kids get vs. people without kids. My cousin, for example, is a doctor, and when her colleague went on maternity leave early, my cousin was asked to cover for her because everyone in the practice has kids except for my cousin. This is routine behavior in corporate life (I know – I benefit from it all the time at my own company where I’m the only one with kids.)

So what we don’t need is a day when people's kids come into the office, disrupt everyone, eat all the good snacks and use up all the good office supplies. The disruption serves little purpose except to remind people without kids that kids are the center of the universe.

So I think this holiday is BS, and kids understand that they can be anything they want to be, so I don’t see a point in dragging them to work. Which is why I didn’t.

I ignored the holiday last year. And when I picked my son up at school, he said, “It’s Take Children to Work Day. Are you taking me to your work?”

I say, “What? How do you know it’s that day? Who told you?”

“My teachers brought their children to school because school is their work.”

What? Is this legal? My kids are in Madison, WI public schools. Surely it is not legal for teachers to bring their own kids into the classroom.

But before I can decide what to do about this, my son says, “I want to go to your work.”

How can I say no? I try to think of a way, believe me. But I don’t have the heart.

The problem is that there is nothing in my office. Just some books.

So I buy a bunch of cookies from the coffee shop across the street from my office, and I borrow the white board from Photis and magic markers from Ryan Paugh. And my son draws on the board in between bites of cookies.

He says, “Take Your Child to Work Day is boring, let’s go home.”

Maybe this is a victory.

Comment on: Take Your Child to Work Day should be cancelled

In general, I think the strength of women is that they see things more clearly. Yes, it’s a glass-half-empty world for women, compared to men, but women should leverage their stronger grip on reality. So here’s my contribution to women and clarity. I am debunking five totally annoying pieces of advice I hear people give women all the time.

1. Take a look at the lists of best companies for women to work for
This is an advertising ploy, not a plan for you to run your life. Every single time there’s a list like this, women write to me from the companies on the list to tell me how much they suck for women. But it’s not like I need those emails. I can just look at senior management, which is almost always all men, and see that corporate careers are set up for a one kind of life: very focused, no other interests, except, maybe, oneself. And this is not all that appealing to most women.

So you can forget the lists. The bar is so low to get on the lists that which company is on and which company is off is statistically irrelevant to women planning their careers.

2. Get a book deal that lets you write about men you admire
Yes, it is exciting to get a book deal, but why do women spend years writing books that fawn over the men they work with? Here are some books by women I admire, and I can’t get over that they spent years researching and reporting on men doing what, in fact, these women would probably like to be doing themselves. Why not just dump the book idea and do the cool jobs you write about instead of pretending you’re not interested in that?

If you want to get paid to write about men, aspire to be Mary Gaitskill.

3. Marry a stay-at-home dad to give you more space to grow your career
Based on my own experience and some research I don’t believe men are happy in this role. Please, stay-at-home dads, do not write to me to say you’re happy. I understand that there are exceptions to this rule, and also that all those exceptions happen to be blogging. But on balance, I find that stay-at-home dads are actually talking about some other project they are doing that is either a) BS and then they are in denial that they are totally lost or b) not BS and then they are not stay-at-home dads but rather dads with flexible work schedules.

Meanwhile, no matter how much money a woman makes, most women try to find a guy who earns more than she does. So whether or not it's good for your career is a moot point; be true to yourself and admit you don't want a stay-at-home husband.

4. Join an all-women networking group
Women are less connected in the world than men are. Men do not drop out of work during their highest earning potential years to take care of kids. So they have better connections. And, in my own work experience, men have been extremely helpful. So why would you go to a group that self-selects for people with fewer connections? There are a million ways to slice the world for networking potential – by location, by interest, by experience, by goals. Why would you do it by sex?

More importantly, it’s clear that women are not particularly supportive of each other. Everyone is competitive, but there are more problems between two women than between two men or between a man and a woman.

I would like to tell you that this is outdated research and that with the post-feminist generation women are not so back-stabbing to each other. But it’s not true. Anne Manci‘s research at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater finds that the culture in the top ranks is still disturbingly slanted toward women taking down the best women. (Thanks for the link, Kristine.)

5. Don’t cry at work
Newsflash. Women cry a lot and men don’t. So let’s just stop telling women to be men at work. No point. People who do best in their careers are people who are their true selves.

And, I have first-hand research on this topic, because I have cried at all levels of my career. To be fair, I cry mostly when I have PMS. But whatever. PMS is just your body telling your brain that you need to start crying about the stuff that you’ve been ignoring all month.

Here’s the big secret about crying though. Men who are secure with themselves and their position in the world actually deal with women crying just fine. So any guy at work who cannot deal with you crying needs to get some therapy in order to be more self-assured. You, on the other hand, are doing just fine with those workplace tears.

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