In therapy lately I am learning to identify my feelings. Maybe you’re thinking this is elementary, but did you know that envy is about wanting something you don’t have, but jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have?
I am thinking about those two things. I am almost never envious, but I am often [...]

I have never been great at picking my own clothes. I’m great at interior design, but I have a blind spot for clothes. So I email Melissa photos of my outfits, and she uses her photographic memory of my closet to edit my outfits.
When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”

I only [...]

Somehow, last year, I got too big-picture. It’s not surprising since I’m an ENTJ. I understand my deficit, which is one reason I picked the Farmer, an ISTP-–extremely short-term thinking.
At the end of the day, the Farmer walks in the house and talks about his day’s accomplishments, and the weather. I used to tell him [...]

This is the big test. Right here. This is the test to see if you will stick with me even when you know everything. There is lameness about me. Not the lameness commenters point out. Not like, I don’t know anything about graduate school. Or I’m not fair to David Dellifield. No. It's more fundamental [...]

This post is sponsored by Tempur-Pedic because we think you deserve to get your best night’s sleep every night.
I've been reading a lot about willpower to find out how to get more. It turns out that we only have a very little bit, and we cannot be demanding it of ourselves all day long because [...]

Now that I’m not the CEO of Brazen Careerist, I don’t have to be the national cheerleader for Generation Y. I fantasized about this moment for years: the moment when I’d write the post titled, 10 Things I Hate about Generation Y.
But it’s hard to hate people you hang out with all the time, and [...]

If you ask the Farmer, he would tell you that I was really really nice to him last week while he was in bed, immobile, strung out on six Percocet a day. I made him pies, and French toast, and meat at every meal because there is no amount of Percocet that would make him [...]

My garden is full of vegetables that I never would have guessed I could grow. There is so much that I am not sure what to do with it all.
Because the acorn falls close to the tree, my son decided he wanted to sell rhubarb at our local farmers market. To be clear, a farmers [...]

Cullen left. It’s unclear if he has dumped Melissa. I think he has. (If you missed earlier installments on this story, here's where I find Cullen in Melissa's bed.)
This photo is from when Cullen was excited to be in lots of photos on my blog.

It was the day that a TV writer emailed me about [...]

Two things really rocked me today. One is the suicide letter from Bill Zeller. The other is the shooting in Arizona.
First, Bill Zeller. I am not going to reprint the suicide letter here. He killed himself,  and he left a 4000 –line note.  He asked that people do not reprint excerpts, but he would like [...]

My new thing is self-discipline.  I am going to get better at it.  I am nervous writing this, because I don’t want to fail.
So this is the first thing I know: If you are really serious about doing something, it’s painful to tell people, because fear of failure is so high. Once you decide that [...]

When the kids and I moved to the farm, last Spring, the first thing we did was plant seeds. The farmer took the kids out to an open patch next to a corn field, and he planted ten pumpkin seeds with them.
I took the kids next to a rhubarb patch that has been growing for [...]

I think each person struggles with one, singular thing. I learned this when I was a graduate student in English. Each writer we studied actually wrote the same book over and over again. We each have a primary question in our lives.
Rob Toomey, a friend who is an expert in personality type, coaches executives. He [...]

It is harder to know who you are than it is to be who you are. Everyone says, “The important thing is to be yourself!”  I say that when I give them career advice. People like you better when you are being authentic. Gay people do better in their careers when they are out of the closet. [...]

So, I am lost. But I need to be useful more than I need to confess feeling lost. So, here I am, telling you what I'm doing to get through this, because I think you and I have an agreement that you'll put up with me being lost and not posting very often, as long [...]

Feeling lost is part of being great. If you are forging your own path then you are often lost. Because you have not seen this route before. I wrote my book because I did not have a road map and I am wanted other people to have a road map to do a career like [...]

It’s the fifth annual Penelope Trunk Q&A. It’s not that I don’t answer questions. I actually answer almost every question I receive. But only rarely in a blog post. The problem is that most questions suck. Look, here are posts about how to ask good questions.
In fact, I've been getting so ornery about questions sucking [...]

This is not an exhaustive list on the topic. In fact, it may be an inexhaustible topic. There are older lists of what I hate. So today's post is merely my most recent list.
Which is notable because hatred is a process. Neurologists have proven that love and hate are closely related, and I have found it's hard [...]

I think I’m over the happiness thing. I think I am thinking that the pursuit of happiness is, well, vacuous. I don’t think people are happy or unhappy. Because I think knowing if we are happy would require knowing the meaning of life, or the ultimate goal, or the key to the world, or something [...]

I am back with the farmer.
This probably is not surprising to you, because admittedly, it is absurd to be engaged one day and not engaged the next day. But there are exacerbating factors, and basically, the way I got him back was to be more likable.
I have spent most of my career overcoming my lack [...]