I leased a BMW when it was clear that that mattered when it came to making deals in LA. I hired a stylist when I realized my clothes were holding me back in NYC. In Madison I have tons of household help so my kids don’t have a crazy schedule because of my work schedule.

I am convinced that frugality is a key quality for a successful career.  Here is why frugality helps your career:

1. Spending money is generally a distraction.
We know this. That people use it as therapy. People use it to fill holes they perceive in their lives. But the psychic energy it takes to spend money actually distracts us from what matters to us. Pay Pal reports that people wish their significant other would spend less money on Valentine’s Day. This encapsulates the whole problem to me.

2. Spending money is a vehicle for overcommitting.
The biggest example of this is graduate school.  The people who do best in a bad economy are those who are flexible about the types of jobs they can take and the types of careers they can move into, according to Philip Oreopoulos, professor of economics at University of Toronto. This flexibility is specifically limited if you go to graduate school – you commit two, three, four years to a given career whether or not it’s going to pan out for you in the long run. And you commit to paying back school loans, which means you need to take a job that earns enough to pay those loans.

3. Spending money limits possibilities.
If you invest in an expensive bicycle because you’re going to do triathlons then you limit your ability to take off more time from work to actually train for the triathlon. In most cases, renting a house is better for you than buying one: If you buy a house, you cannot easily downsize, you cannot as easily relocate, and you end up limiting your earning power. (That link is to my brother's blog. This is dinner table conversation in my family.)

4. Entrepreneurship is a safety net if you're frugal in your home life.
Careers today are unstable, and while companies used to provide safety nets for employees, today we have to create our own safety nets. The best way to do that is with entrepreneurship. But starting your own company is nearly impossible if you have high income requirements. Startups don’t provide high incomes at the beginning.

As I write this, I think about my friends who spend a lot more money than I do. I have friends with really nice houses, friends who take super fun vacations, and I have friends who would not be caught dead in the clothes I wear to work (for example, plastic rain boots because I don’t want to pay for snow boots.)

My friends would say there’s a compromise: You don't need to invest everything in your career. You don’t need to give up all the creature comforts of life. You can still have a good situation with both.

Maybe it’s my obsessive nature. I’m willing to make extreme tradeoffs. I wrote earlier about wanting to be an expert. About how it takes a singular, daily focus. And I think I have had that with writing. But in order to do it, I have given up a lot. I’m not sure if that’s right.

Do we hear about Mozart playing kickball? I know, there wasn’t kickball. But if there had been, he wouldn’t have played it. Because you give up stuff.

So I guess what I’m saying is that being an expert in something requires frugality. It’s not just a spending frugality. It’s a focus frugality. It’s the recognition that spending money is actually a distraction from the passion at hand. So the less you spend, the less you’re distracted.

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Until now, I have been pretty much on the outside of this American tradition: The tradition of building up Thanksgiving to be a great family moment and then the family not living up to it. But everyone still does Thanksgiving basically because they love their parents. I’m not gonna say here that I don’t love my parents. But it’s a special kind of love that does not involve being with them for holidays.

But this year is a big switch for me, because I’m doing Thanksgiving family drama—with the farmer.  There is family drama because the farmer has three sisters who think I have a morality problem. Like I don’t have morals.

In fact, the whole family thinks this, and those with Internet connections print out blog posts about sex acts and send them, via US mail, to less connected family members. The outcry crosses state boundaries from Wisconsin to Illinois, and sometimes, I think they are googling terms like Penelope Trunk and sex. I mean, it’s not easy to find the stuff they are finding.

Wait. You are wondering, right? What they’re finding? Here. Here’s a list of some links. And, now no one has to do any morally-compromising searches. It’s all right here:

The often-sought, ill-advised, business-trip tryst

When women get power at work, do they use it like men?

Six Sex Scenes (my 1994 master's thesis, graduate program for english, Boston Univ.)

Honestly, I like the sisters. Their ideas about how to live life seem fine. I think I’m living the same morally responsible lives they are, even though they’ll never think that. Also, the farmer’s parents are always very kind to me and my sons.  So, it seems like Thanksgiving should be okay.

But Thanksgiving in a family where there’s a family business is different.

I’ve always meant to write a post about the farmer’s business acumen. He reminds me of the most resilient, innovative startup guys I know. The only difference is that he’s not doing Web 2.0—he’s doing cows. There are pieces of the family business I’m dying to tell you about. Like, the sweetness of the farmer and his parents working side by side for twenty years to pay off the farm, and the cleverness of the farmer figuring out how to be part of the local food movement without organic certification.

When I first met the farmer and his parents I saw rolling fields, warm milk and grass-finished meat. Now I see them just like the other family businesses:  Family conflict.

Cut to the farmer’s kitchen. I am cooking the farmer’s beef and the farmer’s squash, and if you think this is insignificant, consider that when the farmer told his parents that we’re getting married, the dad’s first question was, “Can she cook?”

The farmer takes out his phone and plays a message for me from one of his sisters. They are leaving messages pleading with him to dump me. Sometimes they cry. For him, of course. For his future – like I’ll take his money and run.

Also, sidenote: I think the sisters think the farmer has enough money and shouldn’t get any more, so they are outraged that he wants to negotiate with his parents, and they blame this on me. (Don’t get excited: The farmer has a lot for a guy who has done a good job farming and spent almost no money in fifteen years. But I could be with an investment banker if I’m marrying for money. Believe me, a farmer is not a smart move for marrying for money.)

After the voicemails and the ensuing doldrums, I remind him that our marriage counselor (no, we’re not married, but we’re early birds catching the worm) said that his family would be a big problem for him.

He tells me that we need to call the lawyer.

This is how we operate.  I always want to call the marriage counselor to make sure the farmer still loves me. And he always wants to call the lawyer, to make sure he’s going to be able to keep farming with his parents.

Is there anyone else who needed to sign a prenuptial agreement before Thanksgiving? I did. I had to sign to make sure the parents feel certain that I’ll never get my hands on that farm while they are alive. I signed. After all, my board would go ballistic if I did not have a prenup that protected my company. So I figured, okay, now everyone is happy in business-land.

But the problem with a family business is that if everything is not done up tight, by lawyers, then everyone has different ideas about who owns what. The farmer’s family business is, I think, a mess.

So the farmer’s family is negotiating. The farmer is telling his parents that if they can’t come to an agreement then he’s selling his portion of the land and leaving.

To live at my house. Let me just say that when we tried that out—where he lives at my house and doesn’t farm—it really sucked.  He missed the farm and I kept telling him he could buy another farm and he kept saying that he misses farming with his parents. But his lawyer tells him he doesn’t have a choice except to be prepared to leave (and live as a grouch at my house). Because how else can he negotiate?

I think negotiations like these are the only way for family businesses to survive.

I used to work at my grandma’s bookstore. I worked with a cousin—Laurie. She told me I should move to LA even though no one wanted me to. Everyone thought it was a crazy idea. But Laurie explained that the job of families is to keep you in line with the rest of the family, in a predestined path that is good for the family. And your job is to create your own path.

It seems to me that often, families are complicated, hurtful and constraining. But a family that is in business together must somehow rise above that, and encourage each member to express themselves, and find what moves them, and act on that. It’s a more generous model of a family that what most families are.

So this Thanksgiving, for me, is like watching a play. I don’t have a huge stake — I just want to be with the farmer, wherever he goes. So I watch, from afar, hoping everyone can agree on how the business should be, and hoping no one mentions how much they hate what I write.

Meanwhile, I think the sisters are hoping to wait out the storm. The farmer has dumped so many women that his family can’t believe I’d have staying power. And, of course, he has dumped me 15 times, so the family does have a point.

I ask him what I should talk about. “What if they bring up my miscarriage?”

“They won’t,” he says, “They’ll bring up the weather.”

And he laughs. Because of course, I’m more conversant on reproductive rights than the weather. And no one talks weather better than a farm family.

We get into bed and talk about how we will only spend a couple of hours at Thanksgiving with his family and then we will go back to my house where we will have Thanksgiving with my Ex. (Need I say more about this situation than that the dinner with the Farmer and the Ex will be the more relaxing of the two?)

We talk about how the farmer needs to do chores in the morning with his dad. And we need to bring two pies for his mom. And we go to bed all cuddly because the farmer loves talking logistics. Farming seems like it’s about land and animals and being close to the earth, but it’s really about the logistics of land and animals as you try to control the earth.

I look at the farmer and say, “Oh. You’re so happy now because we talked logistics.” Then I kiss him and turn out the light.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, we eat hamburger because he doesn’t feel like it’s a meal if you don’t have meat, and I won’t eat pork because even though I’m with a pig farmer, that doesn’t mean I’m not Jewish.

I want to ask him about what he told his sisters about me and my kids coming to Thanksgiving.

I say, “I need five minutes to talk.”

I have to tell him the duration because he doesn’t like conflict without a set endpoint. I once explained that the endpoint for personal conflict is death. But he needs something sooner.

Comment on: Thanksgiving drama on steroids: Adding a family business to the mix

Q: Why do you pay $50,000 a year for a house manager?

A: The short answer is that I am buying a stay-at-home wife. Most people, who are at a similar spot in their career and have young kids at home, have a stay-at-home wife. (This is, of course, because I have the type of career that is dominated by men, and women without kids.)

I know you are thinking that most stay-at-home wives are taking care of kids. But almost all kids are in school most of the day. But the women are still busy. They are doing the infinite number of things required to run a household. Here is a sampling of things that I am sure that none of the startup CEOs I met with last week thought about for one second:

–What should we get my niece for her birthday?
–Who is the best teacher to request for third grade?
–Should the kids have private swimming lessons or is group okay?
–What's the best way to train the dog not to pee on the sofa?

Those questions actually require thinking and planning, and they are constant. Running a house is like running a business, and very few people can do both well.

And then there's grocery shopping. Do you actually enjoy it? Why not decide what your time is worth, and decide if you are actually going to grocery shop over the million other things you could do. It's all a question of priorities, and for me, most things that are high priorities do not cost money, they cost time.

So instead of asking yourself why I'm paying $50K for household management, ask yourself why you are not paying for that, because it's a bargain — salary.com says that a stay-at-home mom is worth $135,000 a year. Also, for those of you who have the coveted stay-at-home spouse, thank that person, because you're getting all the work done for free, and you're getting sex, too.

Q: Why does it cost so much to live in New York City?

A: I write a lot about how expensive it is to live in NYC because the majority of people in their twenties say they want to live there. And then, when I say something like when I was making $200,000 I was at the edge of poverty in NYC, people (who have never lived in NYC) tell me I'm crazy.

The first thing you need to understand is that visiting NYC does not give anyone the experience of what it's like to live in NYC. For example, most New Yorkers don't take cabs because they don't have enough disposable income to do that, unless it's a treat. And most New Yorkers do not live in an apartment as big as the hotel room you have at the Hilton.

Another thing you need to understand is that everything in NYC costs at least $2, because shelf space is so expensive that there is no way any store owner can stock anything he couldn't sell for at least $2. Watch what you buy for a week–all the things that are less than $2 where you live. They are not so inexpensive in NYC.

The other thing you need to understand is that people become like the people they hang around. We know this is true for a wide range of qualities. For example, if you hang around fat people, you'll become more fat. If you hang around successful people, you'll be more successful. All because you start to value the things that people around you value.

So I'm going to tell you how life is in NYC, and you would think you'd never do that, but you would, if you lived there. Here are some examples:

You would eat out every meal. Really. It's just how things are done. Home kitchens are small, takeout is cheap, and you pass a great fast-food opportunity every fifteen yards.

You will pay $300 a month to park your car somewhere that's an hour away, just so you can still get away from the city on the weekend. You will do this because life in NYC is fun and interesting but claustrophobic. You will never afford an apartment with space, so you will substitute weekend getaways for space.

You will pay $150 for your haircut. You will tell yourself you'll just do it once, because everyone else is. And then you will love it. Because it really does make a huge difference. And then you will get them all the time.

Q: How can I change careers without taking a pay cut?

A: You cannot change careers without taking a pay cut. It is childish to ask this question. So stop asking it. Instead, live below your means so you are not a slave to your career choice. Everyone can cut back on what they are spending. Everyone. Life is about difficult choices, if you are not willing to cut back on anything—your big house, those expensive dance lessons, fun family vacations—then you essentially are cutting back on your workplace engagement. You are saying that it's more important to buy all the stuff you're buying than it is to be engaged in your most rewarding work.

In most cases, really, you get more bang for your buck by switching to a career you like than staying in something else for 20 years just to live what is your fantasy of adult life. Because really, adult life is not about getting all the things that make you look stable and successful. Adult life is about constantly making difficult decisions about what you are going to give up.

So stop thinking about career changes without pay cuts. It's impossible. Some of you will say in the comments section that you did it without a pay cut. I challenge that: I think people who make career changes without pay cuts actually do both careers at the same time in some capacity, for a while. In that case, the cost—the pay cut—is really your time: all the other things you did not do while you did both careers. (I did it that way. It's a great way to ensure you don't take a pay cut, but also it removes all time for friends.)

Comment on: 3 Questions you ask me a lot, about money

NYC has the most extreme benefits to it, but it also requires the most extreme concessions in order to get those benefits. This makes sense. It’s how most of life is. So in order to understand how good a fit you’d be in NYC, you don’t need to look at the benefits – we all want the benefits of NYC. What you need to look at is what you give up.

Here are three questions to ask yourself. You need to answer yes to at least two in order to be a good fit in NYC.

1. Are you a maximizer?

Optimizers are people who are always looking for the best of everything. You know if you are this kind of person because you are never complacent. You are always trying to find if there is something better. It could be a someone who cuts bangs better, a better pickup basketball game, you keep trading up boyfriends, maximizers are always looking for something better, and they usually get greatness in their lives in many aspects. Non-maximizers can be satisfied with what they have. Each of us falls somewhere on this spectrum. New Yorkers skew heavily to strong maximizers.

This is because you can find pretty much the best of everything in NYC. (Yes, maybe there are some things, like the best ski slope, that you cannot find there, but if that’s what you want most, you probably shouldn’t be in NYC.)

I know you have heard that NYC is expensive. But you will never really know how insanely expensive it is until you live there.It’s like having children. Everyone will tell you having kids is really, really hard. Harder than anything they’ve ever done. And everyone will also say that after all those warnings, they still were not prepared for how hard it was when the baby came. This is what money is like in NYC – you absolutely cannot imagine how expensive it is there until you are there, living day to day.

So New Yorkers constantly have to ask themselves: What am I paying so much for? What am I suffering so much for? Life in NYC is very hard (here's funny commentary on that), and if you go to any city in the US, there is a bond that ex-New Yorkers have because they know they each understand how hard life was.

I say this to tell you that the only way to justify the cost and hardship of NYC is because you’re an optimizer. You appreciate having access to the best of things. Not everything – you probably have a few things that are really important to you. And you’re willing to trade off a lot of comforts to get it.

2. Do you want to be at the top of your field (or marry someone like that)?

In many cases, people have to work in NYC in order to rise to the top in their field. (Or, they want to marry someone like this – NYC is a very competitive place to find a husband but only because women recognize that the pickings are superior: Maximizing knows no bounds.)

Wanting to be at the top of your field is not for everyone. Business Week reports that eighty percent of generation Y thinks they are in the top ten percent of all workers. So a bunch of you are overestimating your capabilities, right? But the truth is that NYC is very, very competitive, because it's a magnet for ambitious, strong performers, and if you are not in the top, you will probably not do very well there. So if you do not go to NYC thinking you will work your way to the top of your field, you probably don’t need to be going there for your work.

And, of course, you do not necessarily have to live in NYC to work in NYC, but in order to get a substantially lower cost of living, you would have to move pretty far from the city. This is why New York has the longest commute times of anywhere in the country. This is a fine line to walk, though, because long commutes do a lot of damage to one’s ability to be happy. So you are probably better off paying to high price to live closer to work if you want to get to the top of your field.

3. Do you value an interesting life over happy life?

New Yorkers are not known for being happy. In fact, they are known for being unhappy, and they don’t care.

On balance, New Yorkers understand that most people who are happy are complacent – they like the status quo. And people who like what they have do not do innovative things to change the world. They like the world just fine how it is. This is probably why 95% of New Yorkers voted democrat in the last presidential election. Republicans are typically happier with their lives than democrats. And most New Yorkers are maximizers, and maximizers are almost never happy.

New Yorkers think an interesting life is more important than a happy life. What you really pay for with the exorbitant cost of living and the hard lifestyle is to be surrounded by strong performers, huge ambitions, and constant need for change and innovation. To live in New York City, you have to trade happiness for this. To most New Yorkers, it’s a no-brainer. They would take that trade any day. To most people outside of New York City the trade-off is crazy.

Hat tip: Time Out New York

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Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist favorites, then are there any gender gaps we should be concentrating on? Yes. Here are three:

1. The startup gap. Women need to be compensated at a higher rate than men if they are to give up their personal lives in order to work. Law firms accomplish this by keeping women on partner track even when they’re part-time. Corporations do this by offering flex time and other business-bending options for high-performing women who want to take care of kids.

VCs talk endlessly about why there are so few women running venture backed companies, but it’s incredulous talk. The reason is that VCs don’t pay women more. Here’s the bottom line: If you take a man and a woman doing the same office job and the same parenting job, the man will think he’s doing a good job at parenting, but not the woman.

This makes genetic sense. The men had to think the kids were fine when they left the cave to hunt. Or else they wouldn’t leave and no one would have eaten. The women had to think the kids always needed more attention. Otherwise, the women would say, “This is good enough” and then the kids would starve or get eaten by lions.

How this translates to the VC world is that you need to spend TONS of time away from kids doing a startup. For women to do that, they need to be compensated more than men. Other industries have done it in order to benefit from women's brains. The VC world should follow suit.

2. The orgasm gap. People who have orgasms do better at work: they earn more, they hang out with higher powered people, they are better at public speaking, and they walk with a more confident gait, which, of course, inspires confidence.

So we need to pay attention to the orgasm gap, which Hannah Seligson reports in the Daily Beast: "Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and even winning Indy-car races. But there's one area where the gender gap has proved particularly stubborn: The orgasm gap."

Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, says, "The orgasm gap is an inequity that's as serious as the pay gap, and it's producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry."

Where does this orgasm gap come from? Probably the amount of effort expended in bed—and who's expending it. England's study found that women give oral sex to their male partners in all contexts—from casual hookups to serious relationships—at significantly higher rates than men do. (Hat tip: Sepideh)

And if you’re wondering how this pans out across generations, things seem to get worse in the younger crowd—Caitlin Flanagan reports in the Atlantic that girls are giving blow jobs just to get the boys to shut up.

3. The fun gap. As soon as men and women start aging, the men are happier. Maybe they have had more training on how to have fun. But life is too difficult for any of us to wait to have fun. So we should all start learning to have some levity early on, and this is the damage of the fun gap.

You can see the gap at the bar. Alcohol makes us have a more broad imagination and do a wider range of things. So why is it more acceptable for professional men than professional women to go out with friends and get drunk? Why is it okay for men to get drunk in order to have an easier time hooking up, but it’s not okay for women? This is such a serious problem that New York magazine calls the gap the the last frontier of feminism.

It’s clear that women are spending more time following the rules than men, and people who have more fun actually do better in life: their fun snowballs, and the more we enjoy the more we get of what we enjoy.

It starts in kindergarten, where the girls sit in their chairs and pay attention in class, and they socialize in the lunchroom. The boys, on the other hand, have spent the first five years of their lives turning everything into a gun or sword and cannot be contained in a classroom atmosphere.

Yes, these are generalizations, but as the mom of two young boys, I have never heard any parent disagree with these generalizations, (and it's official that boys are six months behind girls developmentally by kindergarten). I did not buy guns for my sons. I didn’t have to. They can use anything. And I remember as a fourth grader thinking, (from the back of the classroom, where all the strong performing girls sit because they don’t need help from the teacher) “Wow, the boys sure are doing poorly in school.”

The problem is that the boys are having all the fun. Women are doing better than men in school but school is not what makes kids successful at work. What actually prepares you for life is athletics, aiming high, breaking rules, playing video games. Girls should do those things more. Then, as they grow up, they should spend their time figuring out how to get more orgasms.

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I had never been to Madison in my life, and you know what? It was a good decision. Except for one thing: I ignored the data about schools. I didn’t believe that a city known for progressive social programs and university filled with genius faculty could have poorly performing public schools. But it ended up being true, and all economic development research says do not move to a place with crap schools—it’s a sign that lots of things in the city are not right.

So when you decide where to live, pay attention to the research. Ignore stuff like the geography of personality because it’s interesting, but there’s no data that says it correlates to what makes you happy. And pay attention to research that flies in the face of everything you know, like you can be a millionaire anywhere. But, then, you should probably not be looking at that research because being a millionaire won’t impact your happiness so it should not impact where you choose to live.

Here’s some research I’ve found recently that you should consider if you’re considering relocating:

Live by water.
People who live inland are not as happy as people who live near water, according to research coming out in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. And some scientists think this is because humans evolved by following the shorelines and living off water life. So, the Journal of Preventative Medicine shows that if you live in the Appalachian Mountains you are twice as likely to have mental illness than if you live in Hawaii.

Live where people have as much money as you do.
Of course, the Hawaii vs. Appalachia issue is clouded by the overwhelming evidence that people have a lot more money in Hawaii. It’s true that money does not buy happiness. But it is only true if you are not living in poverty. Poverty is pervasive in Appalachia, so that probably accounts for a lot of the mental health problems there. But don’t go move somewhere where everyone’s got a lot of money, because financial security is relative. And you need to have a little more money than your friends do in order to feel financially secure.

Move to where your friends are.
If you move within a mile of a good friend, both of you will become significantly happier, according to Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Harvard. If you’re considering relocating away from friends and family because you believe money will buy happiness, you are sort of right. But Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London shows that you’d need to have a salary increase of at least $133,000 in order to have a net positive impact on your happiness from that move.

Move to an inexpensive city if you want to start a company.
Seventy percent of Gen Y wants to start a company. So a lot of people are relocating to do that. You might think you need to be in Silicon Valley since the people there never shut up about their startup culture. But in fact, most startups need to keep their burn rate low more than they need that mythic startup culture, so you should move to a city with a low cost of living.

Maybe you should stay where you are.
When one spouse relocates for another, they generally end up earning less over their career because of it. So maybe spouses should stop relocating, period. There is a widespread feeling among Generation Y that transience is exhausting, and relocating away from family and friends for a job is a nonstarter. And anyway, it used to be that you could get a company to pay for your relocation, but Microsoft just announced it is no longer doing that, and you can bet other companies will follow.

So at some point, relocation starts looking expensive, high risk, and maybe a bad idea. Unless you’re starting from New York City.

Comment on: How to decide where to live

To really get tips for being a CEO with young kids, you'd have to hang out with me for a day. Like, last Tuesday. Which was just another day of being a parent and running a startup. Except this day starts at midnight. When I decide that I am not going to go to sleep because I have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to drive to Milwaukee to catch a plane to Atlanta at 7 a.m. And here’s the first tip:

1. Get sleep. The kind that is not warm and sweet.
I decide I’ll stay up late and work but what I find is that I’m mostly eating. First coffee. Then coffee doused in sugar. Then peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I covet each morning I make them for school lunches. But normally I restrain myself.

I see now I’m too stressed for normal restraint, so I go to bed.

My three-year-old is in my bed. If I get in, he will snuggle and whisper “I love you” in his sleep. But when I get up to go to the airport, he’ll have a fit, because what kid wouldn’t hate to wake to his mom leaving his house in the middle of the night?

To shield my son from childhood trauma I take him out of my bed and put him in bed with my ex husband, who is sleeping in the bedroom down the hall so that I can leave on business trips.

2. Be great at business travel. But get out of it whenever you can.
I set the Blackberry for 3:30 a.m. And when it wakes me I feel like I slept for ten seconds. But this crappy itinerary was my idea. Because I was so excited to go in and out in one day and not have to stay in a hotel.

At my gate I write a blog post, and I feel really good that I can do it at 5a.m. in an airport on no sleep. I send it to my editor and tell him I’m a star for sending it a day early – usually I send it an hour before I want to post it.

Then the flight is delayed. Then it’s broken and delayed. Then it’s probably not happening. Then I see that I will not get to my meeting if I wait for the next flight. But another airline has four, gloriously direct flights that get there in time. I am happy.

Until I hear that the cheapest ticket is $1200. So I call Atlanta to say that my flight was cancelled and I can’t get another.

3. Go to the office when you could go home. Go home later with impunity.
I want to go home and sleep. But I go to the office because we are getting ready to pitch to VCs. We have a lot of great ideas for what we are building for the community. And we are obsessed with the news that Gen Y is not using social media at as high a rate as Gen X is.

I spew the statistics about how bloggers are higher earning and higher educated than most people, and the average Twitter user is nearly 40 years old. We see our spot in the world, and we draw on flip charts and make PowerPoint slides, and then the nanny calls.

And I remember that since I’m not in Atlanta, I can take my son to his T-ball game. So I leave. Here’s something Gen Y really hates: when Gen Xers bolt out the door early to deal with their kids.

4. Prioritize. And keeping the kids from screaming comes first.
I pick up my sons and they want shorts for T-ball. I’m happy about this because I can run in the house for their shorts and check my twitter feed, which is hard to read on my Blackberry.

In the house I grab a diet Coke and the fridge light doesn’t work. I am so focused on shorts that it takes me two more light switches to realize my electricity has been turned off.

Then I remember that paying the bill was on my to do list. Somewhere. Under blogging and investors and T-ball. Yes, I know this is totally irresponsible. But the bill got too big at the end of last year, when my company was not paying salaries and I was not paying most bills.

Also, last week I took half the money for the electric bill and bought my six-year-old a new violin. I told myself that was OK because the violin teacher said his fingers were missing the notes because the violin was too small, and solving that problem seemed more important than paying the electric bill on time.

So I go to T-ball. Because it’s way easier to deal with no electricity when kids are consumed with swinging bats at each other.

5. Get as much help as you can afford. But there will never be enough.
I call the house manager, who has written “pay electric bill” on a post-it maybe ten days in a row, and I tell her the lights are off. She gives me a plan for getting electricity back the next day. Her plan entails paying the bill in person, and stopping at the grocery store for treats, and going to McDonald’s Playland, so the kids are quiet while I’m on the phone with the electric company.

The six-year-old asks what we’re doing. I say, “The Internet is turned off. I have to turn it on again.”

I know this is very serious to him. Because he is consumed with watching YouTube to find out how to win levels in Super Paper Mario on the Wii.

He explains to his younger brother, “This is serious. If we don’t fix the Internet, Mommy won’t be able to work. And neither will her helpers. And people will not see penelopetrunk.com.”

6. Don’t be sneaky. Kids always catch it.
Once I pay the bill, the sun is almost setting, and I need a plan for being in the house in the dark. The house manager makes a plan: Go to a hotel.

But I don’t want to because the kids will know something is wrong. I worry they will be messed up from living in an unstable household. They will grow up wanting to work at the same job at the same company for 60 years because my unstable startup life made them crazy.

So I get them very tired at Playland. They run and scream and I almost pass out on the table because now I am going on three hours of sleep in 24 hours.

Then I take them home to perfectly choreographed sequence of pajamas-book-bed just before the sun sets. They fall asleep and don’t even notice there’s no light.

Then I realize that I didn’t get flashlights. So I get the Dora the Explorer flash light out of my six-year-old’s room and wave it around a little to test it. He asks what I’m doing.

I ignore him.

He goes to the bathroom to pee. He says, “Hey. The lights don’t work.”

“Yeah. I know. Just pee and go to bed.”

“Hey. My bedroom lights don’t work.”

I ignore him. I tuck him in and kiss him and I tell him that it might be very dark if he wakes up in the middle of the night, but he can call me.

“Did you not pay the bill for the lights?”

WHAT??? How does he know this? Bills? He knows about bills?

I say, “Yeah. I forgot to pay the bill. But we paid it now. And the lights will be on tomorrow.”

“In time to play the Wii before school?”

“Well. Um. No.”

“You forget so many things. You never forget your work things and you always forget the house things. No mommy forgets more than you do.”

Then he says, “Mommy, I’m scared. I don’t know how dark it’s going to get. And the house will feel haunted. And what if I can’t see you?”

I get the kids out of bed. I decide we’ll go to a hotel.

I grab the essentials before the sun goes down in our house: Stuffed animals, my laptop, my purse, and gel from my dermatologist to squash breakouts. Because people like to read falling apart in stories and words. But people start to worry if they see the falling apart in your face.

Comment on: 6 Tips for being a CEO without ruining your kids’ lives. I hope.

This is a problem because our company has been out of money, pretty much, since November. We have revenue, but not enough to cover operating expenses. So we’ve all given up a portion of our salary for a while now. And we stopped paying rent. And we didn’t pay freelancers, (which meant that for the past months, any time something broke, it was very high stakes because we couldn't hire someone to fix it.)

The lack of money got so bad that one day I was driving to Chicago to meet an investor but the company credit card (which is really Ryan Healy’s credit card) was declined. And I didn’t have money for gas. So I had to drive back to the Brazen Careerist office and get money from Ryan Paugh, who is the only person in the company who has any sort of financial cushion in his life. But he only had $20, which is not enough to get to Chicago, so the investor had to meet me in Milwaukee. And buy me lunch.

The no-money thing has also been stressful at home. At first I cut back on stuff that was not a good idea. Like, cut back on the vet for our two new kittens, and then it turns out they are not that new, at least to the world, because one got the other pregnant. And now it’s really expensive because we have to have a cat abortion.

So I looked for more innocuous cutbacks and thought of my ex-husband. I am supposed to be paying him $250 every month for two years. But he already sort of lives in my house anyway. Because I’m nice. And I thought maybe he wouldn’t notice it if I didn’t pay him that. Or he wouldn’t say anything. Because he’s nice.

I also cut back on the cleaning woman who comes every day. Please shut up about how it’s a luxury. Anyone who has a stay-at-home spouse has someone doing a quick clean up of their house every day. Also, it’s pretty hard to have an ex-husband in and out of my house every day if I have to clean up after him. And, a clean house is so important to women that it is actually a good indicator of whether or not she’ll want to have sex. Women like having sex more when their house is clean.

Not that anyone is having sex in my house. Well, except for the kittens. But my point is that cleaning is important.

I also thought it would be good to decrease household help because the other night we were having dinner and my six-year-old found an apple seed. He said, “Let’s save this til the spring and then plant it and grow an apple tree. And we can water it every day. I mean, we can pay someone to water it.”

Okay. So I told myself cutting back expenses is an okay thing to do to keep the company going.

And then we got funding, but we are not allowed to use the funding to pay debt. So all the months that people have been expecting to get back pay, they are wrong. That’s not happening. And, also, all the freelancers are not going to get paid.

The investor tells me, “Oh, this is fine. Treat your stock like Monopoly money and give it to the freelancers.”

This does not sound right to me. So I call the guy on my advisory board who is plugged in to all things Silicon Valley. He tells me that paying stock is generous. He says a lot of companies would just not pay. Period.

I am still scared, though. I was a freelance writer for five years, and I got so frustrated when people didn’t pay.

But I called one of the freelancers we owe money to and asked him if he’d take stock and he confirmed what my advisory board member said: Stock is surprisingly generous and startups screw people over all the time.

Great. Now I’m ready to make the rest of the calls.

Things go pretty well. No one is happy. But we have always hired freelancers we adore, so we have good relationships — well at least we do at the beginning of the calls.

Then I get to my SEO guy. He is a nut. First of all. Let me tell you a little about the SEO world. It happens after dark. I don’t know why the SEO guys don’t sleep, but they don’t. Also, it’s always guys. I think because SEO runs a lot like the mob and the mob is all guys. Really, think about it. Who are the top Diggers? Guys who never change out of their pajamas. And who is ranking on Google for top search phrases like “buy guitar lessons right now” or whatever. That’s right. Guys who never change their pajamas.

So, anyway, my SEO guy is very gracious about the stock. And I make a note to myself to maybe stop twittering about how he’s a crazy person. But then he calls back and says, “Uh. Could I have links instead of stock?”

Really. He tells me his plan to dominate the world by having his various web sites rank high on Google for odd business term searches. And, then, after he shows me all the places on my blog where I mention the perfect business phrase for linking to him, he says, “Um. And also, you know that post about your first date with the farmer? I’d like a link there, too.”

Yep. That’s right. My SEO guy has a gardening site, and apparently my farmer page is one of the most popular pages on the Internet for this one, specific word, which he does not want me to tell you because he thinks you will then develop a site yourself to leverage traffic from this word.

I go to the board meeting with Ryan and Ryan. We report that we got the debt off the books and we’re ready to take in the money. And I am feeling sort of good. Like we’re turning a new page in the life of our company. And snow is thawing, and I’ll draw a salary again and I’ll get some cute spring skirts. In fact, I’m hoping maybe I’ll get enough money to revamp my whole wardrobe: Does anyone want to buy a link on that farmer post?

Comment on: For a startup, money doesn't solve problems, it just changes them

Here are five trends that are emerging in the face of the largest job-loss numbers in the last four decades.

1. Being cost-conscious is cool.

These days, for the wives of the few investment bankers who still have jobs, shopping couture is something to do in secret. Hermes gives unmarked bags for customers who request it. The Obama girls showed up to the inauguration wearing J. Crew. And they looked adorable, which should inspire the reasonably-priced shopper in all of us.

And cost-cutting isn't just about fashion. Michelle Obama has to overhaul the White House décor. (Great quote from Barack : "I'm not a plates-on-the-walls kind of guy.") And she's heading toward Pottery Barn. I love that!

This trend is very freeing to me because my favorite dress for this winter is from Target. It is velvet but not really velvet – sort of crap, cheap velvet. And when I bought it, in September, I worried that it was over-the-top-cheap. But now, I feel more uncomfortable wearing my $400 boots than I do wearing the $20 dress.

2. An increasing backlash against baby boomers.

Newsflash: The baby boomers got us into this mess. They borrowed against future generations. They mishandled SEC regulations. They ignored the environment. They set up a social security system that is going to break as soon as they’re done taking from it. And they took the best education this country had to offer, and then depleted the education system for the next generation.

Obama is the first Gen-X president. And, to the surprise of all the baby boomers who have been trash-talking Gen-X forever, it’s Gen-X that will bail this country out of the mess the baby boomers got us into.

In the meantime, Generation X is the first generation in the US ever that will earn less than their parents. And Generation Y has an incredible amount of debt due to baby boomers pushing up college costs and housing costs while real wages went down.

The under-45's are stunned by the selfishness of the baby boomer era.

3. More Sex.

When I was a Boston Globe reporter, one of my best interviews was with David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth , who has analyzed the relationship between money and sex.

He says that more money does not get people more sex, it merely gets them more choices of people to have sex with. This makes sense. I've never heard of someone abstaining from sex until they make enough money to date a model. And anyway, we know from Dan Airley's research that if someone has too many choices, they don't do anything. Sure, this research applies to jam samples in grocery stores, but maybe someone should investigate if people actually have less sex when they earn so much money that they can choose from anyone.

Okay. But back to the recession. Amazingly, it turns out that less money equals more sex. I am not totally sure why this is, because the research comes from what is now one of my most favorite resources, Durex condoms, a site that does provide a lot of qualitative analysis for their statistics.

Still, Durex reports that drugstore sales of their condoms were up 6% during the time Lehman went under. And sales in the New York City sex toy emporium Babeland increased 25% in that same time period. So the deeper the recession, the more sex people are having.

4. Women are earning all the money.

We already knew that in big cities women earn more than men. The trend is probably going to spread to smaller cities because the men comprise the majority of people being laid off during this recession: finance, manufacturing, construction, all men.

What will this mean for social fabric? If the pitches I receive from publicists are any indicator of what's coming, things will be very bad at home. More than one press release has instructed women to use the fact that they are earning the money to force the guy to do more around the house.

Here's a pitch for the book, Breakdown, Breakthrough: The Professional Woman's Guide to Claiming a Life of Passion, Power, and Purpose. She encourages women to use their earning power to "commit to breaking the female pattern of overfunctioninig." Presumably this means getting the guy to do more cleaning even though we know that men absolutely do not think the toilet needs cleaning as soon as the woman does.

So basically, women are being encouraged to use the fact that their husbands were laid off as a way to get the men to act like women at home. Bad. Very bad.

5.Companies are finding more cost-effective ways to recruit.

Business Week reports that the recruiting models are broken, and in the downturn, companies aren't spending money on stuff that doesn't work. Instead, companies are turning to online networks. And pundits are declaring that 2009 will be the year that corporations understand how cost-effective it is to leverage social media for corporate messaging.

What this all adds up to is a shift in recruiting. Candidates have known for years that sending a resume to Monster is like sending it into a black hole. Online networks are finally giving recruiters an alternative to the old ways of doing business.

And really, that's the silver lining of the whole recession, right? It's an opportunity for each of us to look at what we've been doing before that wasn't working anyway. Because in a bad economy the stuff that we could sort of get by ignoring will kill us if we don't take action. And taking action to do things better is what we'd want for ourselves in any economy.

Comment on: 5 Emerging trends from the recession

Today's guest post is an open letter to Obama from a twentysomething investment banker working in a London office of a US bank. The letter is in response to the salary caps Obama is putting on bankers who receive bailout money. The cap is $500,000.

I do not necessarily agree with the ideas in this letter, but I think this is an important workplace topic for debate.

Dear Mr. Obama,

First of all, I would like to say how relieved I am to have made it through your firewall despite writing from my workplace account. Secondly, I would like to congratulate you on your bold and assertive moves to nip that pernicious weed we call capitalism in the bud. It's about time somone brought change to the outdated american dream.

I would like to humbly request however that you apply the principle of capped pay to other areas of my professional life. For instance, can we also cap hours worked?

I know what you're thinking – sounds a little too French. But I think the great American people could learn from the French. After all, circa 250 years ago they were the world's greatest superpower only to fall into precipitous decline at the hands of a fiscally irresponsible and greedy ruling class (seeing any parallels?). The people believed in change and made it happen (capping pay was a little too bourgeois for those times, so they resorted to capping heads, but all in all it is the same).

Now – 250 years later, France have rebuilt themselves into a fine socialist state, and while they are not quite a superpower, their president is regularly intimate with Carla Bruni – what more do you need?

I believe in france the rule is that 35 hours of work a week is plenty and any time beyond that is free time ("le freedom time"). That may be a bit too radical for Wall Street at first, but may I suggest we use the same yardstick you used to cap pay – benchmarking it to the President of the United States.

Recent press reports indicated you start work at 9am and are sometimes seen in your office as late as 10pm! It also mentioned that you have meetings on Saturdays (and wear slacks, which is a step in the right direction – I can't wait to see what the press says when you unleash the true Hawaiian in you and show up in board shorts and flip-flops!). So I will go ahead and estimate your average weekly working hours at 62 hours (9am-10pm 2 days a week, 9am-7pm 3 days a week, plus a 6 hour day on Saturday – please let me know if these assumptions are way off). I bow to your superior judgement, but I would just like to open the debate on limiting our working hours to 62 weekly hours.

I admire you greatly, and if this were implemented I would be able to follow your example more closely. I could become a more dedicated family man. I could work out daily (cardio and weights). I could walk about topless for the paparazzi. All in all, a few years down the line I would look back at the positive change you have made in my life and feel a debt of gratitude. All I ask though is that you please consider this suggestion.

Sincerely,

Bill

Comment on: Twentysomething: Obama's salary caps should cap hours too