When we were at LegoLand I was struck by the high emotional intelligence of the employees. Their job is to make everyone feel like their Lego project is great. (You'd be surprised how many parents are there, swiping the white blocks from little kids at the Lego snowman contest.)

High emotional-intelligence jobs are very hard, and I would rather sweep floors. But I force myself to try to improve my emotional intelligence because people who don't try to improve it generally suck at it. And people with high emotional intelligence are fascinated by how to get even better at reading people.

So I'm always seeking out new data points for emotional intelligence so I can get that social skills boost I most definitely need.

Here's what I've learned about the social skills secrets of successful people:

1. Don't try to fake emotion.
The first thing you should do is stop trying to fake that you care. It simply doesn’t work. You know the studies about smiling? They show that if you really smile, your eyes wrinkle. If you fake smile, those wrinkles are not there. And we read that subconsciously.

In fact, most of what we read subconsciously is correct. Here’s a good summary of that in the Economist.  But the bottom line on reading people is that we have had millions of years to perfect the skill, and we’re good at it.

We can also tell right away how someone feels toward us. Researchers at the University of Toronto found that people judge empathy accurately in just 20 seconds of video without sound. This means we are reading the face. This also means that it’s pretty difficult for someone who doesn’t feel empathy to feign empathy.

2. Focus on doing rather than feeling.
I read a lot of books about how to have good social skills, and the instructions are always something specific I should say or do. For example, if someone is talking about themselves, I should not interject to talk about myself, but rather, ask a question about the other person.

I can do this. But I have a hard time caring, and it shows up as awkwardness—an act of empathy but no empathy showing in my face. Now I get it:  the whole “passing for normal” goal is useless.

It’s much easier for me to follow rules that involve doing instead of caring.

3. Pay attention to personality types.
You know you should make people feel good by recognizing them for their work. But it’s actually difficult to know the right way to do that; one way won’t work for everyone, and, not surprisingly, it comes down to personality.

There are four dominant types of personalities. (Take the Myers Briggs test here to find out yours. It’s free.)  There are four dominant types of people, each motivated primarily by either power, relationships, craftsmanship, or ideals.

4. First recognize then reward.
It's important to first recognize a job well done, with gratitude. But also, if you reward the person with appropriate work then you'll encourage a repeatedly outstanding performance. (Insights is a company that trains managers to think like this.)

Here are the four personality types and how to inspire them.

Power. Type-A types. For a job well done, reward this person with public recognition when a task or project is finished. Reward the person with visionary, forward-thinking projects.

Relationships. The cheerleader type. This person also wants some sort of public recognition, but it should be fun. And the thank-you speech is really important to this person. Reward them with projects that are varied and well defined.

Ideals. The crusaders. This person wants to be rewarded along the way, not just at the end. Reward this person as part of their team, not alone. Show faith in their ability to build strong partnerships by giving them more work to leverage that skill.

Craftsmanship. The perfectionists. Reward this person for attention to detail, and do it in a private, one-on-one way. They don’t want big fanfare. This person wants acknowledgement that they did a good job by seeing executive management adopt their work as the standard.

4. Judge yourself on how precisely you give a compliment.
You might not be in a position to reward someone at your company, but you are always in a position to acknowledge the work someone has done. This information helps you understand who wants acknowledgement for what. And you can mention something to them.

This seems subtle, but the difference between high emotional intelligence and merely average is that everyone knows you should give compliments when you can. But not everyone knows who needs what sort of compliment.

I know you’re thinking that the workplace is dead between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but actually, December is a great time for careers. Here are five reasons why:

1.     Job hunting is great in December.
January is the biggest month for hiring, but December is the second-best month for a job hunt. This is because people have budget allocated for jobs on a yearly basis. And if they don’t fill those jobs, they lose the position in the new budget. So all those hard-to-fill positions have to get filled no matter what this month. Also, people have money they did not spend in other areas that they can put toward a new hire. But they don’t know if they have that money until the end of the year. This all makes for a hiring frenzy in December, and since most candidates don’t realize this, the candidate pool is not as full in December either.

2.     The path to a promotion is shortest in December.
It’s true that everyone who has lots of power at your company is gone by the middle of December. And it’s true that you will spend a lot of time wishing you did not have to work in December. But there are plenty perks from being at the office in December. And one of them is that if anything important flies through the door, the person who usually handles important stuff will be gone. This is an opportunity for you to step up. Keep an eye out for something big. Something too big for the people who are left in the office. And that’s when you should volunteer to work late. Take on that job. You’ll look like a great team player, and you’ll get great experience to boot.

 3.     Jewish solidarity feels strongest in December.
In general, the Jews lay low. We don’t like to draw attention to ourselves at work. And we don’t like to bug people about being Jewish. We don’t want you to become Jewish. We just want you to leave us alone when we need to do things like take off seven, random days in October for a slew of Jewish holidays that are not nearly as well marketed as Chanukah. This doesn’t mean, though, that we are not annoyed with all the Christmas stuff. We are annoyed when you say “Happy Holidays” because we know it means “Merry Christmas to those of you who don’t celebrate it.” In fact, we are annoyed by a lot in December. And it makes being Jewish feel a little bit better, in a Woody Allen kind of way.

4.     Everyone has their kids home.
I spend most of my days going nuts trying to do homeschooling and work at the same time. It’s pretty safe to say that my career has taken a hit  and that I am going nuts trying to figure out how to do both. So I’m really looking forward to the two weeks that everyone has their kids out of school. Those two weeks I’ll look like the queen of managing parenting and work while everyone else is more discombobulated than I am because they only do this two weeks out of the year.

5.     Hookups!
It turns out that 40% of people have had hookups at holiday parties, according to Ruth Houston, an infidelity expert. And Trojan reports that most men are willing to have sex with someone they meet at the holiday party. (But then I wonder if Trojan ever did a poll to find out when men aren’t willing to have sex with someone they meet?)

I told this to my brother and he pointed out that most people have been to ten holiday parties by the time they are thirty. So he thinks people are underreporting their hookups.

Whatever the true number, here’s some advice.

Men: women who earn more money are accustomed to receiving more oral sex. So choose your target with your own capabilities in mind.

Women: If you are not the same age as the guy then let him make the first move. Statistically, the match is more likely to stick if you follow that advice. And here’s some more advice about how to get the guy  you work with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Hide your feelings if they are going to be trouble for someone.
I am still a major shareholder in my company, but I do not work at the company day to day. I would like to say that my neediness issues and fear of abandonment do not follow me to my workplace, but in fact, they are huge there. And I spend a lot of time worrying whether people listen to my opinions because they care or because it’s easier to listen than to try to get me to shut up.

When the board meeting rolls around, I get nervous. I don’t know if I should go or not.

I like to go because I like knowing what’s going on. Well, and of course, I like giving my opinion. I also like hanging out with the board. I really like Ryan Healy now that I don’t have to work with him. And everyone on my board is someone who did a huge amount for me at one of the (many) very tough times in my life. (Like this time.) So I just really like everyone.

So, while I am deciding if I should go to the meeting or not, Ed Barrientos, the CEO tells me that the company would pay for me to go. Ed is incredibly cheap when it comes to any company expense, so I take this to mean they really care about me being at the meeting.

2. Focus on clothing because it’s easier to control than personality.
I wear my dark J Brand jeans and a purple shirt from Banana Republic. The clothes I choose are really important because I don’t want people to think I’ve lost my edge on the farm. I can’t look too farm-y. I have worn jeans and a black top to every board meeting ever. That’s fine for men, because the only criteria men have for clothes is that you look hot. But now that there are women at the company, and I will have to stop in and say hi, and the women will think I don’t know black is out.

So it is out of my comfort zone, but I wear purple.  I work really really hard at looking like I fit in. Which you have to do if it’s impossible to fit in. If you fit in, you can think about being a little bit special. I try just to not be special.

3. Act nonchalant about things like a private jet. Making any scene is bad.
The board member who has a plane, Erik, has had, for a very long time, the job of keeping me in line. When I had a screaming fit at the attorney’s office about the investors lowering my salary, they brought Erik in to talk to me. And he never stopped.

I love his patience for me, but I also love his plane. Did you know that companies do not put their logos on their corporate jets because it’s bad PR? So I fly in and out of airports that look like all the planes are full of CIA operatives.

4. Acknowledge that you make people uncomfortable.
On the plane, Erik reminds me that I should try to behave well at the meeting.

I tell him that I know he didn’t like the time that I made paper airplanes to keep myself occupied.

I tell him that to assure him that I know what bugs him. But the mention of paper airplanes seems only to remind him of bad things, so I assure him that I brought new pens to keep myself busy.

“Jelly Rolls,” I say. “Do your daughters use them? They’re really fun. They sparkle. Or there are some that are dull. And the ink is like squishy liquid.”

Board members do not like hearing about Jelly Rolls. I did not know this is a rule, but I infer it from the look on his face. Just not immediately. I wish I had noticed sooner.

5. Suffer in silence. If you talk about pain, people will think you’re a pain.
Then my abscess tooth starts to hurt. It was already hurting that morning. So I put a few Vicodin in my purse, which I have from the dentist who said I might need some in the few days I’m waiting for the oral surgeon.

The thing is that was two years ago. Two years ago when I was supposed to get my tooth pulled. It is dead. Or whatever an abscess is. The dentist said I’m very young to have a dead tooth.

I cried. I didn’t tell him that it’s not fair that I’m losing teeth because for my whole bulimic life I was really careful to brush my teeth after every vomiting episode.

I also didn’t tell him I wasn’t going to have the tooth removed. I mean, I will. Just not now. It’s too upsetting.

6. No mind-altering drugs on short notice.
Erik and I land and I thank the pilots. I have noticed that Erik, the King of Being Normal, is always gracious to everyone. And I am oblivious to everyone. So it stands to reason that for him to think I’m normal, I need to be gracious.

I thank the driver for being there to meet us and then I thank him for waiting for me to go to the bathroom.

The tooth is hurting a lot, and I am worried I’m going to pass out. It would actually be good to pass out with Erik. He would figure out what to do and he’s a get-things-done kind of guy. But he would not like it. He wants to feel secure in the idea that I’m stable and he won’t have to rescue me again.

So I think of popping a Vicodin, but what if it makes me loopy? Then maybe they wouldn’t invite me back to a board meeting. Then they’d tell me to dial-in, and I’m a notoriously bad listener on the phone, so they’d assume I was checked out, and then it’d be like I wasn’t there at all.

So instead of a Vicodin, I take ten Advil.

7. Try to do what is expected in each situation.
In the car, on the way to the meeting, Erik looks at his email, so I do that too because if you want someone to like you, you should mirror what they do.

Then Erik stops to pick up lunch. He asks if I want lunch. Everyone at the company knows that I hate eating with a group. So he only asks because it’s the normal thing to do. He knows I will say no. But it’s good to be normal. I get it. So instead of saying, “No, of course not,” I say, “No, thanks.”

He nods.

I see the line for sandwiches is really long. So long that I’d have thrown a fit and demanded to go somewhere else. But Erik is not a fit thrower. So I see that I’m going to have some extra time.

8. Fend off all possible emergencies.
I go to the bathroom to investigate the tooth situation. On the way to the bathroom, I pass a dentist’s office. That gives me confidence. Because something really bad would not be really bad too long because I could just slip right into that office and ask for some help.

In the bathroom I take out my earring and use the pointy part of the earring to work on my tooth.

The puss was more like popping a big yellow zit. It sprayed onto the mirror. I popped it a few more times, a few more sprays onto the mirror.

Then I clean everything up. The mirror, my mouth (now there's blood dripping, which is how I know I got all the puss) and I redo my makeup, which takes a while, because I pretty much have to wash my face and start over.

When I get to the car, Erik is there. Waiting. I say, “Oh. Sorry. Were you waiting long?”

He says, “Yeah. Did you take a tour of the building?”

9. Explain yourself so people don’t assume the worst.
That is Erik’s way of asking if I did something bad. He knows me well. He sees possibilities. He is worried I did something not appropriate.

So I need to tell him something because it is not normal to walk around a strange building for twenty minutes. Which, it turns out, is how long I’ve been gone. I want to let him know that I was doing something okay.

So I tell him that I have an abscess tooth and I had to pop the puss part.

“It was interfering with my speech,” I tell him. I try to convey that I was just worried about being normal for the board meeting. Which is true.

He is not going for it. He thinks I take insane risks. Which, to be fair, is the only reason there was even a company for him to invest in: because I took insane risks. But whatever, risk takers always look exciting from far away but never up close. So I try to tell him that I definitely made a choice on the side of caution because I made sure there was a dentist’s office nearby and also, I did not take the Vicodin.

He says I didn’t need to tell him that.

I’m not sure what I needed to tell him.

10. Get a list of expected behaviors and then execute on that list.
I am well behaved for the meeting. I do not tell everyone that I think I know more about Brazen Careerist’s traffic than everyone else even though I don’t work there. People do not want to hear that from me. And someone with good social skills would say it differently. So I keep quiet while Ed talks.

And I keep quiet when people talk about the weather and sports. Well, not really. I say no, please, don’t do smalltalk. It’s so awkward. And then they talk about it anyway. Which is a sign they think I am on good behavior.

At dinner, everyone compliments me on my good behavior at the meeting. I paid attention, I had no outbursts, and I did not do anything completely inappropriate.

I breathe a sigh of relief and then spend five minutes ordering because I’m terrified of not having complete control over the contents of my plate.

11. Recognize the crazy people and don’t follow their lead.
Then the guys reminisce about farm times in their childhood and it turns out that they have been cow-tipping.

“That is not nice,” I tell them.

I tell them we would never do that on the farm, and that one of the signs of a child turning into a sociopath is treating animals poorly.

They laugh.

I do. I think about it all the time.

As a preventive measure I tell the farmer that if he cheats on me, I’ll stay with him. Forever. I’ll never leave him. He’ll be stuck on the farm with me, in misery. I try to create a scene in his head like a Beckett play:  Two characters isolated from the world, in a room, making each other miserable.

Melissa and the Farmer always assure me that they will never do that.

One night, in bed alone, I ask the Farmer: “Do you think about having sex with Melissa?”

He says, “Well, I notice her body. But I don’t think about having sex with her.”

I say, “Of course you notice her body. She has a size 00 waist and a size C bra cup.”

“Well, okay. Then stop talking to me all the time about having sex with her and then I’ll be less likely to think about it.”

When I ask Melissa if she is going to cheat, she is horrified. Probably because it would ruin everything we have here. Also, though, I don’t think she’s attracted to him.

The problem is that I think she is getting more attracted to him. Which gets me thinking about how you can tell if someone will cheat.

1. Cheating is a lot about proximity.
We are most attracted to the people we see most often. I have read this in a lot of places. Most notably, a co-worker is more apt to like you if you work in the same office, as opposed to telecommuting, or working in another field office.

But the proximity research works for families, as well. A psychologist I interviewed, around the time that the Farmer was dumping me because his parents hated me, told me that if I were living on the farm, his parents would start to like me more because proximity leads to affinity.

This never happened, by the way. The Farmer’s parents hate me more than ever and they disinherited the Farmer from their land even though he is still the only one of their kids farming on the land.

What it shows me is that you have to be open to affinity in order for proximity to enhance it.

I think a man is always open to affinity when it comes to a woman half his age.

And check this out: 70% of married investment bankers have cheated on their spouses. This doesn’t surprise me as much as the fact that they are most likely to cheat on a business trip, with whoever is near them at the time.

Also, the reason half of Enron was indicted is probably because we become like the people we work with.  (The people least likely to believe this, by the way, are law students who take on tons of debt and say they will join a big law firm, not get addicted to power and money, and when their loans are paid they’ll join a nonprofit.) So cheaters foster cheaters.

Location location location.

2. You can estimate the verity of someone’s response to: will you cheat?
Melissa’s horses arrived.

In order to get the Farmer to agree to horses, Melissa told us, over and over again, how great she is with horses.

I believed her.

The Farmer says that a lot of people say they are good with horses, when really, they know nothing.

Melissa told the Farmer about how her parents home schooled her so she could spend all of her adolescence at a stable, helping the trainer with the horses.

The Farmer said, "Okay. Get horses." But he knows absolutely nothing about training horses and he can’t help her at all. So she cannot ask him for help—he doesn’t even like horses.

The horses got here and they were supposed to come already accustomed to having a saddle on them. Instead, they reared up like in a Lone Ranger movie when we tried to ride them.

So Melissa left the horses in the stall, sort of ignoring them.

After a few days, the Farmer said, “Something’s wrong. She is not doing anything with the horses.”

It turns out that Melissa had no idea how to get them to lunge longe without a pen. I don’t even know what the word lunge longe means, actually. But the farmer went out and helped her. And it turns out the farmer is great with horses. It turns out that he knows how to get the horses to lunge and Melissa was not so confident.

This scenario makes sense to me because people's ability to self assess is generally constant.

For example, the Farmer generally underestimates himself, and Melissa generally overestimates herself. If you can get a read on how someone estimates himself in one scenario, then you can apply it to other scenarios.

All that makes me think that the Farmer is a little less likely to cheat than he tells me, and Melissa is a little more likely to cheat than she tells me. And the farmer loves the horse more than he admits.

3. Assuming everyone is honest is a better way to live.
It’s hard to be trusting. But I’m not sure I have another choice. People who trust those around them are happier, more successful people. I want to be that.

And I’m struck how all the same things we do to build trust at work are the same things we do to build trust at home.  So the more trusting you are the more trusting you get.

4. Being able to identify cheaters is a useless skill, even if you could do it.
Melissa sent this link from The New Inquiry to me about spotting liars. It's an interview with a college professor who talks about how he sniffs out plagiarism. When he describes the signs, they make sense, but I might have missed them myself. For example, he says, “The correct use of a semi-colon is a red flag to me,” because most college kids don’t use semi-colons at all, let alone correctly, when writing their papers.

The interviewer, who is someone who writes college papers for a pay, suggests that maybe so many kids plagiarize because the ability to come up with the stuff on their own isn’t that useful when it’s right there on the Internet. And maybe the kids just don’t value a college education.

Hm. First of all, I think that probably is true. And a Stanford study shows that writing for social media is more educational than writing for class anyway.

So what is the point of the guy being able to identify plagiarizers? Sixteen percent of the students plagiarized. He needs to realize that he has more problems than he does cheaters. For starters, he has the problem that kids obviously don’t see value in what he is teaching.

Also, did you know that the biggest problem with theft at Barnes & Noble is employee theft? They spend a lot of money to guard against internal pilfering. It seems like it’d be more effective to spend the money on making people happy at work.

5. Distractions are the best antidote to obsessive worry about cheats.
I did some research about cheaters. And it turns out that people who are likely to cheat have a ring finger that is longer than their index finger. I got this from Dr. Phil via Perez Hilton. But before you bitch about my sources, it does turn out that a longer ring finger is a sign of higher rates of testosterone in utero.

But I don’t know how useful this will be to me.  Because I have a longer ring finger. And I have never cheated on a boyfriend, or in a 15 year marriage. But I think that testosterone thing does make a difference in work. I think I’m better, more able to compete in a man’s world, because of my extra testosterone.

So maybe I’ve been no use to you as to how to tell if someone is cheating, but you can tell if a woman will fit into an all-male office by looking at her ring finger. Really.

And this is my food blog post for all of yeterday's commenters who think I would not be a good food blogger. You will love this post:  it’s about what to do if you think you’re about to be fired.

1. Be really interesting. And fun. It’s a lethal combination.
This photo looks disgusting, because that is the truth about food. Most of it looks disgusting. Even stuff that tastes good looks disgusting in a photo. It’s like sex. If you have a cinematographer and three lighting guys and a foley artist who comes in at the end, then the sex looks great. But if you take a picture of yourself having sex, forget it. You look like gross, retarded animals.

So even good food looks disgusting. But this photo is not actually an example of that, because this rhubarb cobbler tasted disgusting as well. Too much flour, I think. Although Melissa kept saying it had too much butter. Maybe too much flour and butter and it needed more rhubarb.

The thing is that Melissa made the rhubarb cobbler. She has cooked exactly three times in the five weeks or so she has lived here. But I liked that she cooked. Cooking is so nice. It’s just a generous and vulnerable thing to do for the person who is eating. So I didn't care if she did a good job or not. I just liked that she tried.

This reminds me of the research about how people who are incompetent but likable almost never get fired. I mean, Melissa refuses to work on my goat cheese startup, and she seems to have lost my books in China (please, do not ask in the comments when my book is coming. It’s coming) and she spends so much time obsessed with Cullen that it’s like she has only half a brain when she’s with me, but still, I like her so much. So I accept her rhubarb cobbler as an adequate attempt at doing valuable work.

2. Don’t worry about who gets credit and who gets blamed. It’s boorish to care.
We have tons of rhubarb in the garden, left from the people who owned the house before the farmer. The rhubarb is huge and all last year, while the farmer and I were fighting about that I could not get the bathroom tile installed so we were bathing by running up and down the Slip 'n' Slide Double Wave Rider, all last year people would come to the farm and say how could I let the rhubarb go unused. It is such good rhubarb.

So this year I’ve been diligent about pulling off flowers before they flower so the rhubarb lasts, and I give handfuls of it to everyone who comes by, because in the country everyone knows how to make rhubarb pie.

I made rhubarb pie.

I said, “Melissa. Take a picture of my pie. I need a picture.”

She said, “No. You’ll write that my rhubarb cobbler sucked and your pie was great.

“No, I won’t.”

“Yes you will.”

“Just take the picture.”

I saw her spending a lot of time on the picture. I had high hopes.

Here’s what she took:

The pie was good. But, honestly, I sort of cheated. I got a crust from Trader Joe’s. I love this brand. And it comes in pieces so it’s hard to put together and I get to squeeze the edges so my finger prints are on the pie and I think people like that. Also, I mess around with the insides. Rhubarb is a flexible pie inside. I just need some sugary sticky stuff inside. So I put pie filling sometimes. Like, the paste of the canned blueberry filling, or strawberry applesauce. I buy the Whole Foods kind because expensive ingredients make you look like a good cook. (Remember this when I charge you and arm and a leg for humane goat cheese.)

Is it cheating, though, that people give me credit for being a good cook? I don’t hide that I’m taking ingredients that are not from scratch. But really, don’t tell me you make your pies from scratch. Do you harvest the wheat? I do. Well, I’m going to bale hay this summer. So it’s sort of harvesting wheat. But I don’t get credit for scratch, so neither do you.

And the thing is that people just want nice stuff. Good food, good conversation, interestingness in pie fillings. They don’t care who gets credit—Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, whatever. People who stress the most about who gets credit and who deserves it are a bore, and they end up getting no credit because they end up getting fired.

So I say nothing about the pie. I do not fret about whether I should get credit or not, thanking the Farmer when he is effusive about each randomly mixed rhubarb non-recipe for pie I make. Well, I do fret, but I tell myself not to. It’s so easy for me not to care about this stuff at work, and so much harder when it comes to food. But I think it’s just because I’m new to cooking.

3. Prepare a speech.
I had to go to Madison to get food for dinner. We go there for cello. Who drives four hours round trip for a cello lesson for a five-year-old? Only a farm family, I think. Or an insane overachieving Westchester family, maybe. Both family types are insanely protective of the lifestyle they are determined to have.

On the way home, my neighbor Kathy called to see why I wasn’t at home when she walked over to say hi. I tell her to wait—to just walk in and open a bottle of wine and we’ll be there soon.

Kathy is upset because she thinks she’s getting fired tomorrow.

Melissa and I ask her, “Why do you care? We’ve been fired a million times.”

Kathy tells us it’s different in a small town.

I tell Melissa to take Kathy out to the field to collect nettles. It will cheer her up.

Kathy grew up on a farm. She is not going for the nettles.  “Nettles?!?! Like, the weed? You eat those?”

I tell her the Farmer is obsessed with his book about how to forage for food. I do not tell her he is trying to teach himself to live off the weeds on his farm. I have empathy for Kathy.  On my first date with the Farmer he served me dandelion leaves for salad. I thought he was too poor to buy real food, so I ate them all, to be respectful.

I explain to Melissa that Kathy will not be consoled with nettles.

They watch me cook.

Kathy stresses about getting fired. Melissa stresses about Cullen, which is sort of like stressing about getting fired, especially if one considers that her primary job is to get married.

I tell Kathy getting fired just means it was a bad match. She’ll find something better to do.

Although I am not sure what else there is to do in Darlington besides work on a farm or in the school. But there must be something. Or if there isn’t, there must be a big grant for creating Internet startup jobs in rural towns.

We eat rhubarb salad. It’s not bad with canned mandarin oranges.

Melissa tells stories of getting fired like Vietnam vets tell stories about Phnom Penh. It’s a lot of death with a sort-of-inappropriately cavalier tone.

Melissa tells Kathy to wait for the words, “You’re fired.” And then, no matter what words lead up to that phrase, say, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.”

Then Melissa tells Kathy to just be quiet. The silence will be unnerving to the person firing her.

Melissa tells Kathy that also, sometimes you lose your hearing when you’re fired. It’s true. I can’t believe Melissa remembers this detail. I’ve been fired 20 times and I didn’t remember.

Then Melissa writes a script for how to act when you’re fired for Kathy to memorize. If the first book we published hadn't gone missing, I would suggest to Melissa that she turn her advice into a book.

We eat some leftover rhubarb pie for desert.

Melissa sits in my garden with me and talks. She likes to talk to me in my garden because she says it's the only time I don't interrupt her.

In the garden Melissa narrates her Facebook activity like it's a horse race.  And she takes pictures of the farm all day long and posts them to Facebook.

Her Facebook friends tell her she is really lucky to be living on a farm. An old friend of hers that is really not her friend but her ex-boyfriend's friend, says, "You're so lucky. I wish I were on a farm right now."

Melissa tells me he is a designer who can write code and he wants to live on the farm.

"Invite him," I say.

She tells him, "You can come live here. Penelope needs a designer. Can you redesign her blog?"

He says yes. Melissa gives him one of the ten thousand free tickets she has from living in Hong Kong and Milan with jet-set millionaires who foot the bill for everything.

I get giddy. I start making notes about my love for the Pioneer Woman's layout.

Melissa is giddy because she suddenly remembers that this guy is cute.

"What's his name again?"

"Cullen."

"Colin?"

"No. Cullen."

"Colin?"

"Cullen. You already have a Wisconsin accent."

Cullen arrives from Austin the next day. He says he was going to move out of his apartment anyway. So he spent the next 10 hours packing and moving all his stuff to storage.

My sons love him right away.

So does Melissa. The flirting between them is so obvious that the Farmer starts making jokes. We have never seen Melissa so charming.

Also, I tell Melissa I need photos of Cullen for the blog, and she sends me a series of swooning pictures of Cullen on the farm.

I tell her, "Are you kidding me? My blog is not Tiger Beat."

I make our porch into a bedroom for Cullen. This seems okay because he is spending only a few weeks here redesigning my blog.

Melissa sets up a big desk for Cullen's computer and screen. In her bedroom. "It just fits better here," she says,  appealing to the interior decorator in me.

Melissa tells Cullen he can put all his stuff in her room because there's so much more storage there than on the porch, where he's sleeping.

Melissa and I spent weeks creating a sort of still-life-of-Melissa in her bedroom. I can't decide if I think Cullen is a sweet addition or an unexpected eyesore.

That was the first two days of Cullen.

The third day, I started worrying that maybe the porch is sort of yucky. But still, I was surprised to see Cullen in Melissa's bed.

Do you notice how he matched? It was ominous. So the Farmer laid down house rules to Melissa. "No sleeping in the same bed because our kids know you guys just met. They can't see you guys in bed together."

Actually, he made the house rules but I was who told her. It felt ridiculous. But not as ridiculous as it would have been to explain to the kids why Melissa is in bed with the guy who just showed up at our house two days ago.

Then, the next day, Melissa is in bed with Cullen. Sort of just sleeping there like, maybe, if there were one bed left in the whole world, sleeping how I would, next to one of my brothers. But still. It broke the new house rule.

So we had to have a summit meeting. The four of us. The farmer explained that we can't have the kids exposed to confusing sexual relationships in their own house. "I don't want to ever see or hear you guys having sex in the house."

That was nice, I thought. He left things sort of open-ended for in the barn, the hayfield, and other places that might be romantic to two twentysomethings who don't actually have their own home.

Okay. Fast forward.  Melissa is gone all the time, fawning over Cullen. Cullen is not doing anything on my blog because he has Melissa–a full-time job–and he has a full-time job at this startup Daily Dot, which, maybe I am officially launching, since I don't think they have announced yet. But anyway the editor-in-chief is Owen Thomas who is one of my favorite bloggers. So I keep thinking, Owen is working with Cullen so I want to be working with Cullen too. Actually, I want to be working with Owen and Cullen. I want everyone to be working on my new blog design. I have a lot of ideas. Like, I could do a cooking blog where I write about bulimia. No one does that. I think Owen would be a great editor. Melissa could take photos of stuff to throw up.

But there is no one around. Everyone is busy doing Daily Dot and dating on the farm.

It's asparagus time on the farm.

On the farm, you eat whatever is in season until it is gone. You get sick of it before it's gone, but you try to remember that as soon as it's gone, you'll miss it.

We eat asparagus every day and it's so fun to pick it and cook it, but it's not fun to serve it to Cullen and Melissa when I feel like I'm running a B&B.

So I tell them that we need to talk. "I am not getting a good deal here. Melissa is not being a good friend because she is falling in love and when you fall in love it's like you're losing your mind (literally) and I feel like, at best, I have an insane friend ."

So I don't have a friend and I don't have a guy working on my blog and I have these two people who don't cook or clean. Not that I'd want them to. Wait, I'm so excited to tell you this—Melissa is a member of the incompetent elite. A commenter said this about her after an earlier post, and we have adopted the term for her. So, Melissa is part of the incompetent elite and cannot cook or clean.

Cullen says he will start working on my blog.

I say, "Okay. Then I can pretend Melissa is your fun girlfriend you brought along to the farm when you came here to work on my blog."

Pause.

"So, you guys are boyfriend and girlfriend now. I don't have patience for the slow pace of courtship."

They look at each other. They say okay. They laugh.

I say, "I'm happy for you guys."

Then I say, "You have to sleep in the same bedroom. I can't have the kids seeing you sleeping separately and then see you sleeping together. So Cullen, just move into Melissa's room."

They look at each other.

I say, "Sorry to be bossy. But I have to look out for the kids."

They say okay.

They look nervous. I tell them, "Wait here. I'll get you a bottle of wine to celebrate."

Advice admonishing you to break rules is so shallow. How can you break rules without learning them first? People who understand all the rules know intuitively how to break them because they know the rules that really are not working. People who do not know rules are not breaking rules. They are annoying people.

Because for the most part, rules are there to make peoples’ lives easier. There are lots of us in society, in the workplace, driving through intersections. If we don’t have rules there is chaos. Some rules need changing, but you can’t tell that until you know the rules and how they work together.

So instead of giving you advice on how to break the rules, I’m going to give you advice on how to learn them fast.

1. Learn multiple sets of rules at the same time.

The more types of rules you learn, the faster you get at learning them. This is, basically, what a liberal arts education is – learning systems in disparate categories.

I’m fascinated by the yarn bombers. Here’s a photo of some of their work:

 
What makes the yarn bombers so fascinating to me is the practitioners have learned two sets of rules that don’t usually go together: How to do yarn work at a high enough level to do it on the street, fast and furtively.  And how to create street art in a way that has social impact, defies arrest, and leverages networking tools to pass along knowledge.

2. Learn rules you think you’ll have no use for.

Revolutionaries never know where they will land. Because revolutionaries seldom set out to make huge change – they just want to meet their goals, which, at the onset seem completely reasonable – too reasonable to require revolution. The American Revolution is a good example of this.  So is the invention of the web browser.

The fact that most revolutionaries are people who have reasonable, thought-out goals, means that most have a whole catalogue of rules in their heads that they have collected as a way to meet their goals. Marc Andressen, for example, went to school for years to learn to code before he developed a graphical web browser.

Anthony Weiner is my favorite example of having learned a cataloge of rules. He is a Congressional representative from New York, and is renown for colorful antics on the House Floor. In general, he is simply passionate about pushing the very liberal agenda of his NYC constituents. But he is so fun to watch that if Congress would give him more time at the microphone, C-Span might be interesting enough to go mainstream.

Here is a video of Weiner leveraging his encyclopediac knowledge of Parliamentary Procedure to yell over a fellow legislator.

3. You need to know what’s expected to do what’s unexpected.

Great ideas challenge expectations. Which means  you can’t create anything innovative without understanding what has already been done. My favorite example of this is the freshman writing course I taught at Boston University. Most of the students had never read literature beyond the Western canon. So they wrote tales of sex and drugs as if they were breaking new ground.

In fact, it had all been done, since the time of Chaucer. It’s just that my class was filled with writers who don’t read.

You can’t do that. You can’t disrupt ways of thinking, or ways of doing, without understanding those ways.

Mary Flanagan is a professor of film and new media at Dartmouth college.  She creates video games where there is no traditional game hierarchy. Instead of going from one level to the next, a player completes a task and then loops around to do it again – like catching groceries with a paper bag, or laying off a slew of workers and replacing them.  During an interview with ArtNews, Flanagan summarizes her approach as “playing with conventions and expectations.”

Which is, of course, the approach of most artistic revolutionaries, which is why you need to know the rules that have created a set of audience expectations.

4. Leverage the rules you already know.

The young, groundbreaking entrepreneurs establish companies in a field where they are already an expert. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, started writing code in junior high school, and he started not getting dates in junior high. So by the time he got to Harvard he was ready to break the rules in those categories.

Tavi Gevinson had been studying fashion at home and writing in school for years and years. So that, although her life is relatively short (she’s a freshman in high school) she knows enough on these topics to infuse her Generation Z sensibilities to fashion blogging in a refreshing way to rise to the top in the fashion world.

5. Don’t snub your nose at corporate life.

I spent a lot of time in corporate America learning the rules. I realized that no one cared about my ideas, so I did my own stuff on the side, while I spent my days at Ingram Micro learning how corporate hierarchies function. I asked lots of questions about office politics, and salaries, and promotions. I did very little work but, at that time, other people knew very little about the Internet so they could imagine that I was doing more work than I was doing.

I learned how to do only work that people notice. I learned how to make people like me whether or not they liked the work I do. I learned what is important in corporate life (dress code) and what is unimportant (good grammar).

The safety and structure of corporate life is a great place to learn the rules, so it’s no surprise that many of the rule breakers spend a good part of their early career navigating the Fortune 500.

The point I want to drive home here is that you can’t think of ways to disrupt the status quo at its core until you understand the status quo at it’s core. You don’t need to pay your dues, but you do need to understand the field you’re playing in.

The corporate ladder was a slow way to learn rules by allowing someone else to set your timetable and your career goals. Learning the rules is still something you have to do, but you can make your own path for learning that is fast and lethal and makes learning the rules look more exciting than ever before.

Sharon is a color specialist. This is Sharon picking color for a client who Sharon is trying to focus on while I disrupt her.

She started out just being a hairdresser. That’s how I met her. I had a boyfriend who had a terrible haircut and I walked into a salon that looked expensive because he was paying, and I asked for anyone. We got Sharon because she had just learned to cut hair and we didn’t request anyone who had experience.

Now I know better. Now, twenty years later, Sharon is my best friend. At some point, I don’t remember when, Sharon started cutting my hair for free. I asked, like a jealous boyfriend, which other friends she cuts for free. She said no one else. That’s how I feel okay telling you she’s my best friend.

She became an expert in people who are difficult to please. She can make anyone happy with their hair. Then she became so great at dealing with the difficult clients that she specialized even more—people with messed up color. Or people who can never be happy with their color. It’s Sharon’s job to tell you bad news like, “You cannot go any blonder or your hair will fall out.”

When I met Sharon I was a volleyball player. Now, we are both entrepreneurs. She has her own salon—Forme, in Santa Monica—and she is constantly amazed by my ability to get funding for companies that don’t have revenue. I am amazed that she always makes payroll, no matter what happens in the business.

When I get to LA, I go straight to her salon. I have mastered the one-day-to-LA trip. I leave luggage in the middle of the salon and she tells me I have to be less disruptive. She moves it to the side. In a neat pile. Then, without thinking, I throw my shirt onto the pile…

…and miss. And Sharon picks it up and tells me that being tidy makes me less disruptive.

I try to be non-intrusive. I take photos of her mixing my color and she tells me not to get any of her clients in my photos, no matter what, or she’ll kill me.

She mixes my color like she’s an artist. And I’m blown away that she can be so good at business and painting, which is what good hair color is. But the cost is that Sharon and I almost never talk with each other.

We don’t like the phone. At first we worried it meant we are not friends, but now I’m used to it. I tell myself that a friendship between two women with young kids and their own business is going to have a time commitment issue—there’s no way around it.

I think about what it means to have a friend. Because the friends I talk to all the time are people I’m in business with. I was thinking, when I was thinking of what my next company should be, that I should do one with Sharon because then I’d get to talk with her a lot. But I couldn’t think of a business model for us.

Then I thought about how I didn’t have a business model when I had Ryan and Ryan relocate to Madison to do a company. I just knew they’d be good to do a company with and I needed a social life and I can only really get a social life through my work. So I needed work. And I’m unemployable due to eccentricity, so I had to start a company.

I do a bunch of career coaching. I almost always fall in love with the person I’m coaching because here’s what happens. First of all, people self-select. I don’t advertise that I coach—in fact, I think this is the first time I have mentioned it on my blog—so the people who ask me to coach them tend to be creative, independent thinkers. And I like those people.

And I like the process where we don’t have smalltalk—people don’t do smalltalk when they are paying hourly—they just tell me things that are painful, and dreams that are big, and the real truth about their roadblocks, and I fill in where they are stuck, and the conversation is so interesting because when people want to be coached, they are so engaged.

So I get overly invested in people I coach and I give them ideas to help them reach their goals but then I want to know how they are doing, how I can help them more, I get invested in their goals and I think about them all the time.

Here’s an email I just got from Clara Vaz. She has a job as a part of the Court Watch in Swaziland but she wants to shift into work at a nonprofit that helps girls and women. Last Friday Clara sent her resume for me to review and she wrote:

Please don't feel pressed. There's supposed to be some mass uprising next Tuesday and the King has sent police and military into every corner of the country so most likely we won't be at work until at least Wednesday again. But given the general apathy and greater issues (we need to live today, not worry about politics) in this nation, I doubt anything will happen. That and a lack of funding and interest by the middle class. But who knows! The prayer is that no one dies.

These people are not my friends, and they are not my co-workers, but they make my life so much more interesting. And it’s hard for me to understand what a friend is, because Sharon is always there for me, but on a daily basis, things are not more interesting because Sharon is in my life.

I am convinced that many people who were close to me when I was working with them were just work friends. The friendship did not go beyond work. The thing is, it was intense and fun and I liked it. I’m not sure that I mind that it didn’t last.

I like that Sharon’s friendship does not go away when any given job does.

Usually I bring something to do during Brazen Careerist meetings because I get so bored. I don't get bored when I talk. But I get bored when I listen. Unfortunately the only way to hear new ideas is to listen. So I try.

We brought in this guy, Michael Mayernick, from the company Spinnakr. Here's a picture I took of him meeting with us.

He has this great product that can tell where someone is coming from, and then you change your home page to appeal more to the type of person that would come from that site. Really big companies use this technology already, but now Michael's company makes this technology for smaller companies. So now, for instance, all of you who come to my blog from porn sites can get a version of this photo with Michael naked.

When Michael wasn't there, I furtively worked on my site redesign. Not like I did the designing. Melissa did a lot of it. If you think the design sucks, here's her twitter handle: @melissa.

I like the design because there are now more than 1000 posts, and this design is meant to help people get to them. I spent most of my time in DC drawing lists of ways to think about navigation.

And peppering the conversation with bright ideas about where Brazen Careerist should go.

I did not tell anyone in the company that I was taking the title Brazen Careerist off of my blog. I think it is time, though. This is a good design for a period when my career is in transition. I can change the categories and the links all the time until I figure out which parts of the last eight years of writing are best to highlight now.

I hope you like the new design. I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas of what to do next. Thanks.