Sunday nights at our house are dinner with me, the kids, the Farmer and the Ex. They are always fun dinners, and I always feel very lucky for that.

My six-year-old talked about his new baby cousin, Eva (who is pictured, in utero, above). "She has a terrible name," he said, "for Pig Latin. Its Vaeay. It doesn't work."

We all do the vowel arranging in our heads and agree, Eva is not a good Pig Latin name.

"Mom has a great name! It's Enelopepay."

The Farmer says, "It sounds like it could be the name of her next company."

The Ex says, "Yeah, emphasis on the pay."

The three adults laugh.

And then I get nervous. About what I'm going to do next. If you have had three companies, people assume you will have a fourth. So I assume that, too. Which makes me nervous.

When I was in the doctor's office with my son, he was playing his DS and I was looking for something to read to distract myself from the urge to rein in his video game time (I decided that parents who limit video games are delusional.) And I saw this pamphlet that looked like a food pyramid so I grabbed it to get some insight into how to use the food pyramid to make myself not want to eat and lose weight overnight.

What I thought was a food pyramid pamphlet was actually a mental health pamphlet. It was a pyramid that had taking care of life goals and meaning of life stuff on the bottom, and the middle part was daily routine mental health stuff like exercise and talking to friends—the stuff you already know you should do every day. And the top was the immediate stuff. Ways to calm yourself down in the moment. For the most part, the top part was positive self-talk.

I am good at the first two, but the immediate stuff I'm not good at. In fact, I eat when I am anxious. I found, actually, that drinking is more calming when I'm anxious, but eating is more socially acceptable. Xanax is always good, but only if I can sleep the rest of the day. And really, if I have a day where I can sleep then I'm probably not anxious. Not that I would ever know. Because I haven't had a day where I can sleep the whole day since I became a mother.

Anyway, I am trying to find good ways to calm myself down when I'm nervous. And I took the pamphlet home to make myself more conscious of what I do in the moment when anxiety arises. Mostly this means that I've started to tell myself, "Oh, look. I must be upset becacause I'm eating." But in this moment, at the dining room table, while the kids talked to the dads, I went into the kitchen to calm myself down. And I didn't eat. I practiced positive self-talk.

I had rehearsed it before, which is how to prepare for the moment of huge self-doubt. Here are the five points I've come up with:

1. Stay confident that I am making good choices based on good data.
When I started having kids I dropped out of the software industry and the startup world.

The moment was similar to me deciding that homeschooling is a non-negotiable. Everyone told me not to drop out and that I was crazy.

But I had read a lot about attachment theory—that kids need one, single primary caregiver for the first two years. I realized that it's common knowledge among child development experts that kids need a single caregiver for the first two years, but no one wants to be the bearer of this bad news. Because daycare means there are two primary caregivers, at least, which jeopardizes a baby's ability to attach. So sending a kid to daycare was out of the question for me.

And that's how I feel now, about homeschooling. Even though it's wreaking havoc on my career.

2. Remember the times I felt like a failure when it was not true at all.
This research made me intensely committed to finding work I could do from home to support the family. Which lead to temporary financial ruin. And I felt like a failure.

All my friends in the software industry disappeared because we had nothing to talk about. The writers I met earned so little money that I worried hanging out with them was bad for my career.

After a few years, I launched this blog. It got big enough that people who make a lot of money started paying attention to me again. And I didn’t feel like a failure anymore.

If I could go back to that time, I'd tell myself to stop worrying about failure.  The worry just makes the change harder, and no one is a failure in the middle of a big change. You can't fail if you're moving toward something. You fail only if you stop.

3. During big transitions, be clear on priorities.
I have a startup right now. I started pitching some top-tier VCs I'd like to work with and  they said the business idea would not grow big enough. So I showed how I can win at the whole online food business because the barrier to entry for selling meat and cheese online is huge and I have a way to get around that.

Everyone loved my marketing plan. Except that the business was too small to be funded. There would not be a big enough exit and I can’t get great business partners if I don’t have huge exit potential.

That's a problem because I want to work only with hotshots. I don’t want to work with moms who want jobs on the side. Please God do not strike me down for saying this, but as a mom who is trying to have a really exciting career, I don’t want to work with other moms. I want to work with twenty-something men who have no kids and have endless time to address their endless curiosity.

So I worked with an angel investor to craft a business plan that moves quickly from online food to online everything. I talk about the future of shopping . It used to be that shopping was exciting because you could find different stuff in different cities. Discovery and exploration are part of shopping. But online, everything is a commodity. People want discovery and they want to feel that what they are buying is special.

I say all this to show how my online food business will transform the consumer experience. You need to say that kind of stuff to get A-list partners and A-list funding.

4. Getting what you want means deciding what you'll give up.
So last month I got a great developer to agree to move forward with me. Last week there was no barrier to me launching my goat cheese business as step one to transforming the American consumer experience.

Except that I don’t think I can handle talking like this every day for five years. Which is what a startup is: talking like a manic dreamer with crazy ambitions that no one thinks you can really pull off, but some people will take a wild bet on. That’s what it would be.

It’s so fun. But not with kids. It’s so great to have an amazing business partner, but not if they have to chase you down in between playdates. They start to hate you.

So I have this business I’m not doing. And I'm banking on the advice I tell other people, that admitting what won't work to do right now is a step toward figure out what will work to do right now.

5. Keep moving forward and believe you'll go somewhere good.
I am at an in-between stage, and I’ve been here before, so I am going to have faith that I’ll come out okay. I am going to have faith that I am not going to wither away and lose my ability to earn a lot of money. I am going to have faith that when I am done with my current identity crisis there will be top-performers all around me.

I coach so many people in their 20s who are lost, and they are worried that their feeling lost will never end. And I tell them to just keep trying jobs until one sticks. Have patience and believe that you'll figure things out. This is true for me, too. Right now. The more times you live through that feeling of being lost, the more faith you have that you'll keep moving forward and come out fine.

You know what makes me happy right now? My sister-in-law had a baby after losing her first one. I'm really happy for her. And my small, odd family has fun dinners together. And focusing on the stuff that definitely feels good gives me faith to trust that eventually I can put the pay in Enelopepay.

If I look back on my blog, I can see that each year there were one or two ideas that just blew me away and ended up dominating my thinking. For example, 2011 my year to be obsessed with school –  homeschooling and higher ed, 2010 was my year for disillusionment with happiness research, 2009 was when I started writing honestly about how unglamorousstartup life really is.

1. Nature vs. nurture
An important book came out at the end of 2011 that got very little play in the media: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan The title of the book is just awful. Which is probably why it has been roundly ignored. The title should have been Why Nothing You Do As a Parent Matters. That title would have gotten a lot of media coverage, but who would have purchased the book?

No one. Because as parents we are invested in the idea that what we do matters. But it turns out that what parents do doesn’t matter very much. This book is a compendium of evidence from a wide range of university studies that show that once basic needs of a child are met, parents do not really affect how their kids turn out.

Here’s an example of the reach of this evidence: The age that boys first have sex is determined genetically. You cannot influence it by talking to the kid, or preaching to the kid, or whatever. The evidence is astounding. But also disheartening. Because then what does it matter what are parents doing?

One thing is that they can affect how much kids appreciate them as adults. This is influenced by the parents completely. So as this research gains public attention, the shift we will see in spending will be toward things that parents and kids experience together. We don’t need to spend money on shaping the child when the child is already in the shape he or she will be. We can focus on spending money to help the child connect with the parent in a meaningful way that will last their whole lives. That’s all we can influence, as much as we wish it to be otherwise.

2. Lean startup thinking
At this point, the idea of the lean startup is not that new. That's the method for launching a startup where you continually ask questions and refine as opposed to setting up a goal and driving unequivocally in that direction. It's a process for dealing with the reality that we don't know what will work and what won't work. Eric Ries came up with the idea, wrote a book about it, and now he's at Harvard evangelizing it to the next generation of entrepreneurs. The idea took hold of the Silicon Valley crowd first, of course, but at this point, the idea of the lean startup has infiltrated entrepreneur circles in middle America as well.

The lean startup is such a strong, salient idea for our era because it is the natural response to the situation where we have the ability to gather information quickly and move quickly. But why do we only apply this idea to companies? Why not also apply it to our lives? We don't need to figure out a goal when we are in our 20s and then move toward that goal. We can constantly gather information, ask questions, and readjust our goals. Our lives should run as lean as our startups do, which is to say, aiming to get rid of the baggage from goals we once thought might work but now clearly will not.

Next, we should stop investing in our lives as if they are set in stone. The less stuff we have, the lower our monthly costs are, the more flexible we can be to respond to new information about what really works for each of us, in our own lives.

3. Fake is an art form.
Instead of fighting against fake, maybe we should celebrate it. After all, we have a long history of loving fakery. You know what the people did with the discovery of oil paint? Now that they could make lines and colors so precise as to look real, they started painting pictures of beautiful women for men to hold onto when they couldn't have a real one. (Girl With the Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, is a great story of this practice.) Andy Warhol devoted his life to making art about our love of the fake.

So here we are, in 2012, and did you check out the photo of the Apple store at the top of this post? Here's another photo of the store.

Guess what? It's a fake Apple store in the middle of nowhere in China. All the employees think they are working for Apple. And the customers think they are buying from Apple. And though some mistakes are obvious, a former Apple store employee stumbled upon the store and she documents all the little details the store owners got wrong in a very fun blog post.

I want to tell you this is thievery and dishonest and an international crime. But you know what? I love it. Fake is fun, and China is just amazing at it.

4. The rise of career centers.
At some point, there's going to be a huge shift in university politics, and the head of the career center is going to be the god of academia. That's because the value of a school is no longer in the knowledge it spews—anyone can take the classes online. Anyone can access the teacher's papers online, and anyone can email the professor with a good question.

The value in the school is the jobs kids get after they graduate. For some schools, just the name of the school will open doors. For most schools, though, this is not true. And for those schools, the career center has an opportunity to add huge value to the diploma.

At some point, university administrators will stop courting physics professors and start courting a high-profile head of the career center. Because right now the career centers are throwing the students under the bus.

You know what will make this shift go much faster? When US News and World Report gets a reality check about what people reallly want to know about higher education, and they start publishing lists of schools ranked by how well they place kids in the job market after graduation. There's nothing like a new list criteria to force the hand of university presidents. (And in the meantime, we should complain loudly that US News and World Report uses largely irrelevant criteria for school rankings, like class size. It's 2012. If you don't like the size of your class, go online and have a class of one, and then meet your professor during office hours.)

5. The compounding effect. The guy who publishes Success magazine, Darren Hardy, wrote a book called The Compound Effect. I liked the book as soon as I heard the title. I thought to myself, "Of course! Making good career decisions every month is like putting money in a 401K every month!" The thing is that most of us are not putting money in a 401K every month. (And it probably doesn't matter, because saving for retirement is an antiquated approach to life.) But most of us can get the compound effect by making solid decisions each month, again and again and again.

The opening of Hardy's book is: "Ever heard the story of the tortoise and the hare? Ladies and gentlemen, I'm the tortoise. Give me enough time, and I will beat virtually anybody, anytime, in any competition? Why? Not because I'm the best or the smartest or the fastest. I'll win because of the positive habits I've developed, and because of the consistency I use in applying those habits."

I like that. I like the idea of making lots of good small decisions about my career knowing that the compound effect will create big rewards over time. Which reminds me of the idea that captured my attention in 2008: having a strong career is so much more rewarding than having a 401K.

Somehow, last year, I got too big-picture. It’s not surprising since I’m an ENTJ. I understand my deficit, which is one reason I picked the Farmer, an ISTP-–extremely short-term thinking.

At the end of the day, the Farmer walks in the house and talks about his day’s accomplishments, and the weather. I used to tell him that the weather is such a stupid topic that it actually makes me uncomfortable to have him bring it up. But now I realize that the weather is a segue to talking about what is happening right now. And that’s something I need to get better at.

1. Pay attention to the short term.
So my first resolution is to be more excited with what's going on in my life in the near-term.

On January 1st the Farmer separated from his parents’ farm, and he has pigs are at our farm now. (I am saying our farm now. It shows us being a team more. It’s hard to write, but I guess this is a sub-resolution within the resolution: Think like a team.) He used to make the pigs have babies in crates, at his parent's farm. The birthing process was confinement—the moms couldn’t move so they couldn’t roll onto the babies. Now he is letting the pigs breed while they wallow in grassy mud, and he's letting the moms have babies wherever they choose in a barn full of soft hay bedding. The pig will roll on some of the babies probably, but probably that’s why pigs have big litters.

Anyway, the Farmer is excited and scared and curious and he comes into the house each day and says something fun about the new pig setup. I should have something fun to say each day about my work, too. I want to be excited that I’m trying new things.

2. Pay attention to moment-to-moment happiness.
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, and my happiness research idol, is shifting his focus to the workplace. This is not surprising. As our education system grows more and more inadequate, companies are taking more responsibility for educating their employees. So there’s a lot of money in corporate America earmarked for education, and if you have a new idea, you’d best start selling it to those purse holders.

Anyway, Gilbert gives a great interview in the Harvard Business Review this month about what makes people happy. And, first of all, it’s really clear for the last two decades of research that events do not make us more happy or more sad. We overestimate how much a single event will change us – a huge raise, a lost limb – all of it has little long-term impact on our happiness because we bounce back on both ends of the spectrum to our happiness set point – that is, the one we’re born with. (If you’re interested in facing the reality of the fact that happiness is basically predetermined at birth, a good book on the happiness set point, check out The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky.)

So work is simply not going to change how happy you are. That’s not how work works. On the other hand, you do have to be at work for eight hours a day – well, most of us do, in one way or another, even Tim Ferriss – so we should get a good feeling from being there.

And here’s where we can affect our happiness: minute-to-minute. One of the lucky grad students in Daniel Gilbert’s research lab at Harvard is Matthew Killingsworth, who distributed an app (through this blog, actually) to track peoples’ happiness on a moment-to-moment basis. As we learn more about people reporting their own happiness we know that our ability to predict happiness stinks, and the way we remember our happiness levels is inaccurate, but we are pretty decent at knowing how we feel if someone asks us. (I know, this flies in the face of every marriage counseling session in the world, but still, I believe Gilbert knows what he’s talking about.)

This is where we get good information about work. People are happy, minute-to-minute at work if they are setting reasonable goals and meeting them.

3. Pay attention to paragraph breaks.
I want to try new things in my work and I want to set goals for myself. At my core, I think I’m a writer. And I need to always be improving. Some of that will come from forcing myself to make more money from this blog. I have to organize my ideas in different ways if I want to make more money from them, and so now seems like a good a time to tell you that I’ll have a new book coming out this spring. (More on that later.)

I’ve also been forcing myself to try different ways of writing blog posts on my homeschooling blog. (Here’s one that I like that is different than anything I would write here.)

I am obsessed with expertise. And people get better and better at something – anything – by being focused on what they are working on and pushing themselves in new directions to reach hard goals.

I think to myself: what am I doing with my writing to make myself get better? It scares me that I’m not getting better. Mostly, I just need to write more to get better – it’s what anyone needs to do to get better. But I want a goal, also, so this year I’m going to focus more on the paragraph break. I think that’s where the big potential is to elevate my writing.

Like there. Right? You stopped a beat to think, oh, here’s a break. Something big will happen. The break is an opportunity for an intimate moment with the reader. It’s the part of writing I like best, and I could do much more with it.

Do people give New Year’s presents? Here is mine to you. Or to me. It makes me happy just to have this poem here on my blog:

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

By Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned into pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It's been four days since I documented my own domestic violence, in almost real-time, between me and the Farmer. The most common response I've heard is some variation of: "Zero tolerance for domestic abuse!"

And you know what? I have zero tolerance for things I am not prone to tolerate as well. That’s easy, isn’t it?

It’s much harder to see the issue from the person’s perspective who has the issue.

I've spent days reading the 500 comments on my blog and the comments about my situation on other blogs, and I'm absolutely shocked by the collective hatred and disdain for women who are in violent relationships.

Here’s what someone said on my blog: "Victims of domestic abuse suck at pressing charges."

Yes. It’s true. Women don’t like to press charges. Because they love the guy. You, maybe, are unable to fall in love with a guy who is violent. Good for you. But do you have to hate women who aren’t like you?

For some reason, people feel it is honorable to rip a woman to shreds if she is living with domestic violence. Here’s an example from the comments section on James Altucher’s blog:

"[Penelope Trunk is] out of her mind to think that her children are not being abused. She, in fact, is as guilty of that abuse as the farmer that beats her."

The high-and-mightiness that emanates from the public discussion of domestic violence is breathtaking. Everyone is an expert. Everyone knows what’s right.

Here’s an example from the comments section on Jezebel, a supposedly feminist community that is full of anger towards women who live in violent households.

"No one gets another chance to hit me. I don't care that I have the training to fight back.

"One incident, and YOU LEAVE. Violent people don't get better without a lot of work, and it's not *your* problem. Once someone raises a hand to you, you owe that person *nothing.* It's likely that the violent behavior will escalate. Sometimes it is deliberate. Either way, YOU LEAVE."

This person sees everything very clearly. If there’s abuse, you leave. Even if it’s small. Because all small abuse gets huge.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that if the guy hits you twice, the kids are better off living in a single-parent home and hearing their dad called an abuser. What people do say is that the odds are it won’t stop. The odds are it will get worse. The odds are, the kids will be worse off, in the end, having lived with the dad.

But the truth is that we do not believe that men who leave two, visible marks on their wife should lose their kids.

You know how I know we don’t believe this? Because if Child Protective Services sees two bruises on a kid at two different times, the kid is not removed from the home. Think about it: Is that kid better off with parents who might be able to stop, or in the Foster Care System for the rest of their life?

So we are making bets, right? Is it better to leave, because it is likely to get worse? Or is it better to stay because the benefits from things improving, although unlikely, are huge?

I’m in the startup community. It’s the world of high risk. You bet big on yourself, you kill your family’s credit, you put your house on the line, and maybe, just maybe, your company will make it.

So why wouldn’t I bet big on myself now? I am not the whole problem in my family, but I am half. And over the last year I have described multiple situations where I was half the problem.

I can improve my own half and see what happens. Have you been to couple’s therapy? There’s a saying that a marriage is a gear system. If one gear changes, all the gears change.

Blog commenters will argue against this idea by telling me not to change because It's not my fault.

But really, how do they know? We know that I grew up in a home where there was lots of violence. So it's likely that I will be in that kind of house when I'm an adult. And surely it's possible that I am contributing to the mix since I am statistically likely to create a violent household. Here's another thing: You don't know what I did leading up to the bruise in the photo.

I'll tell you what my mom used to do leading up to my dad hitting her:

One night they were wallpapering. They had been wallpapering the living room after work for a week. My mom got mad at my dad and threw red paint all over the wallpaper. Ruined all their work. He didn't respond. He was stunned. Then she knocked over the table with the wallpaper and the glue. It ruined the newly varnished floors. He held her arms so she couldn't do anything else. He held tighter and tighter. She kicked him to get loose. She left no mark. He hit her in the face.

If she blogged about it, and showed the hand print on her face, she might get 500 commenters telling her it's not her fault.

Should she leave with me and my brother because our dad is violent and we should not live with him? Or should she work on her own behavior to see if she can single-handedly stop the violence?

I think the most grown-up, good parenting thing for her to do would be to understand her own behavior and stop it so that me and my brother could grow up in a home with both our parents. She didn't do that, of course. She had little insight into her own behavior and she and my dad ended up taking most of their anger out on me.

My mom had good choices she could have made because, in fact, part of the domestic violence was her fault.

"It's not your fault" completely limits a woman's choices, because you are saying that she is powerless to control the situation. And if you tell every woman "it's not your fault" then they can't improve. How do women get better at not creating a violent household? Probably by changing their behavior. This doesn't mean "always tiptoe around your spouse and become a mouse". But it can mean a wide range of positive changes.

We are all growing personally. It's not your fault is almost always a path to no growth. It's what Oprah founded her show on, right? Personal responsibility. Why don't we go there, first, before we go to "it's not your fault". The truth is that if we take responsibility for the problems in our lives, we can solve the problem. If we blame other people, we are always running. People who blame other people can't get along with siblings, can't get along at work, lose friends quickly. People who facilitate that behavior say, "It's not your fault."

Most of the success of my blog comes from my reliance on the idea of personal responsibility. There are no bad bosses–it's only you. If you can't get a job it's not because of the job market, it's because you are unemployable. And you can fix that.  Your heavy workload is not because someone gave it to you — you gave it to yourself. People like what I say because I show them how they can fix anything when they take responsibility for fixing it. That's what I truly believe.

And that's why I'm staying with the Farmer.

After I realized that the most underrated skill is asking good questions, I realized that I am not very good at it. I don’t ask for help enough because I don’t know what question to ask. And also, I worry the question will be bad and then the person won’t want to help me again.

So I started forcing myself to ask for help. Like, I put myself on a schedule. And the result was not so much that I got good help (I did) but what I really got was good at asking questions. Because I thought so much about it.

Here are things I’ve been noticing about what makes a person good at asking questions:

1. Surround yourself with people who make you curious.
The first time we had a bonfire at the farm I was dating the farmer and he was winning over my boys with tree climbing and hot-dog roasting. I was concerned about fire safety, but I knew it was hopeless when I realized that the number-one rule I learned about building fires – put them out before you go to bed – does not apply on the farm. He just lets it burn out itself.

Here’s something I like about the farmer. He asks questions. When we were dating, and I had a fireplace in my house, he said he’d build a fire. But it turned out he had no idea how to make a small fire. You have to light kindling and then get the little sticks to catch, and then little logs, and the farmer lost interest after about three minutes.

I think this is what draws us to each other, though: We learn stuff we didn’t even know we needed to learn. It’s so hard to learn when you don’t know the right question to ask. Being around each other gives us the chance to learn stuff we’d never seek to learn. Like building fires.

It also gives us practice figuring out what question to ask.

 2. Learn rules for asking questions.
Each industry has rules. Each circle of friends has rules. I think a reason I love work so much is that it’s all about rules. And there is no industry more full of rules than the venture capital industry. It has to be because it’s a matching system between two wildly different types of people: crazy, rule-breaking risk-taking entrepreneurs, and risk-averse, by-the-book, right-out-of-Wharton venture capitalists.

But the VCs are most valuable to startup founders when the founders are learning from the VCs. So there’s a lot of rule teaching going on. One of my favorite recent examples of this is how to ask for time from a busy person. Mark Suster, who is a VC, warns that you should never ask a busy person to lunch, because it’s too big of a time commitment. He has great examples of terrible ways to ask for time and also good ways, like, “grab a quick coffee” which is not so clearly defined, but clearly short in duration.

3. Get your timing right.
When my step-mom was in and out of the hospital getting chemotherapy, I learned a lot about how to deal with doctors. When it comes to cancer, once you pick a doctor, most people advise that you stay with that doctor. And then get to know the doctor well. Because ongoing quality of life depends, in part, on being able to ask good question of that doctor – asking what is happening, how things are going, and what is likely to come next. These are difficult questions for most people because this is an area where the vocabulary is new, and everything feels like a biology test you need to study harder for.

The best advice I got for asking questions was to not worry about asking too many questions, and instead focus on asking them in a good way for the doctor—ask in the morning, when doctors make their rounds. Leave questions at the nurse’s station, and then the doctor can pick up the question when they are starting their day. If you make it easier to answer your questions, you will get more attentive responses.

4. Your questions get better with more information.
The best questions are ones that come after a bunch of questions. The first question is never the real question.

I saw this in action with my sons. When we visited the Baha'i Temple in Illinois.

The first question was: “Can we play tag?” And they stepped on every step and jumped every railing and then asked if there's an area for kids.

The next question was “Do Baha'i people celebrate Christmas or Chanukkah?”

By the end, my older son asked me, “Do you think that the B’hai people would mind that we're Jewish?”

I liked that I could see his questions getting sharper and sharper as he figured out what really matters to him about the visit to the temple.

I thought to myself that I need to be the type of person who asks a series of questions rather than just one. I need to trust that questions are more interesting than answers, and people will not get annoyed as long as each question reflects a little more understanding on my part.

5. Be true to your passion.
Asking good questions means risking that the answer is totally obvious. That’s the scary part of asking a question. Here are tips for asking good questions in life, and here are tips for asking good questions in interviews.

But here’s something I’ve learned. If you ask a question about something you are passionate about and totally engaged in, the question will be good. Case in point: there are no stupid questions when you are asking a doctor about cancer treatment for a close relative.

But there are a lot of stupid questions from people who use the act of asking a question as a substitute for passion and engagement. Other people cannot do the work for you to make you care. When you genuinely care about a topic and have done honest investigation in that vein, trust that your question will be engaging to other people. Passion is always interesting.

Melissa and I had a fight yesterday. We have this fight once or twice a month. Someone who neither of us knows well will ask Melissa something about me just out of an odd curiosity about my life. Something stupid, like, What’s Penelope doing for Thanksgiving?

It’s stupid, yes, but I think it’s even more stupid that Melissa answers. So I tell her don’t talk to anyone about me. I don’t want her to be a source of Penelope information. I just want her to be a friend.

You will notice this is very hypocritical of me. But I don’t care. I make the rule anyway: No talking about me. Ever.

Then she thinks everything is an exception. Like, telling her co-worker what it’s like sitting across from me while I make up dialogue that she is not saying.

So I say, “I’m not talking to you anymore. You’re a terrible friend.”

She says, “I am not a terrible friend. I have really good intentions.”

“Okay. You’re a retarded friend. You don’t understand boundaries.”

“I’m trying. And you see everything black and white and it’s not.”

“Do you think that when Jennifer Aniston’s friend tells the National Enquirer where Jennifer's eating then her friend just says, oh sorry, I’m trying.”

“Are you crazy? You are not Jennifer Aniston.”

“I’m making a point.”

“No. You’re not. You’re sounding crazy.”

“Well, so are you. We should just not be friends. I don’t even need any friends.”

“Call me back when you are not angry.”

“Okay.”

Then I call back in ten minutes. But the truth is, I don’t really like having friends. I don’t like that friends are as much trouble as a boyfriend but they don’t go down on you.

Still, I don’t want to end up being a crazy person. Did you see Grey Gardens? I worry a lot that I’ll end up like them. Has anyone said that Big Edie and Little Edie have Asperger’s? I am diagnosing them right now. I’m not even going to google it to see if I’m alone in this theory because I know I’m right.

Anyway, I worry that if I don’t take steps to be normal in friendships then I’ll end up like them.

Loneliness is a serious matter.  It’s a medical condition. New York Magazine ran an article about loneliness about two years ago. I’m going to quote liberally from it, so I’d better link to it now: Is Urban Loneliness a Myth? by Jennifer Senior (one of my favorite journalists).  She writes: “Studies show that loneliness is associated with morning surges in cortisol, the stress hormone, and increased vascular resistance, which results in higher blood pressure. They also show the lonely drink more, exercise less, get divorced more often, and have more family estrangement and run-ins with the neighbors. And they’re fatter.”

I read that, more than a year ago, and then I started paying attention to how people avoid loneliness.

1. Get a friend at work. Or leave.

Friendship is one of the key factors that make the difference between a bad job and a good job. This research comes from a huge poll from Gallup. Tom Rath, the Gallup pollster who puts data into bestselling books, wrote Vital Friends, which, in a nutshell is about how it’s nearly impossible to hate your job if you have a friend at work.

I have found this to be true. You could have that nagging feeling that the work is not right for you—maybe you’d be better suited in another field—but you will not dread going to work if a friend is there for you.

2. Pick a location that does not feel lonely.

Loneliness isn’t about objective matters, like whether we live alone. It’s about subjective matters, like whether we feel alone, according to Senior. And loneliness, it turns out, is relative. If you live in a town full of single people, you feel less alone than if your town is full of married people.

If you are not married but your friends are, a city is better because it trades on weak ties, according to Stanford University professor Mark Granovetter, in his essay The Strength of Weak Ties.

Weak ties provide a lot of value in our lives. They are, for example, much better for helping us find jobs because they offer us diversity and breadth. The same goes for love. Think about it: if you’re single, you already know all your friends’ single friends. It’s your acquaintance’s single friends you don’t know.

3. Learn rules for friendship, and then bend them to suit you.
One of the most interesting things about Aspergers, I think, is that the need for friendship is very low. It’s there, for sure. People with Aspergers want a friend. But they pretty much want just one. So they spend a lot of time searching for that friend and then don’t let the friend go. People with Asperger’s are extremely loyal, but you couldn’t call us clingy because our need for alone time is so high. (A common marriage for two people with Aspergers is two separate bedrooms so they can have maximum alone time. Knowing the person is next door is often enough.)

I am like this, for the most part. So I’m fascinated by how other people have their friendships. I have had to study the rules of making friends to make sure I have some. (Michelle Winner wrote a great book about these rules.)

For example, I used to have a schedule of when to call people, because friends call friends. But it tired me out. I ended up picking friends who don’t use the phone.

Then I had a schedule of when to visit friends. Because friends hang out together. But instead, I found myself focusing on friends who were out of town. It was an easy solution.

I know I’m not the only person who is confused by the ideas of friendship. I had a friend who was a call girl, and she did only a minimum of seven days with a client. Her specialty was going on business trips with men who could not get their wife to come with him on the trip because she had to stay home with the kids.  I asked my friend if it was just crazy, nonstop sex for a week, and how was that not exhausting. She said the week-long trips were the best type of clients because, “Mostly, the guys just wanted a friend.”

For example, here are photos I’ve been holding onto for a while. It’s a series of the dumbest engagement photos ever. But wait. Before you click I’m going to tell you that they are actually someone’s real engagement photos. And if you thought it was too mean to call out David Dellifield for being an asshole to me, then you are probably not going to like that I’m linking to real-life photos to dis them. So if you feel high and mighty, don’t click.

Really, though, I encourage you to click. Because first of all, these people liked their photos enough to let their photographer put them on her blog. But also, these photos are part of a trend where people do completely stupid, out-of-the-ordinary things for their engagement photos, so they feel that they will have a special, extraordinary life.

But newsflash to all you newlyweds spending too much money on engagement photos: You will not have even an ordinary life. But you will wish you did. You will dream of an easy family life, and easy marriage, and a dog that is housetrained even when you’re gone the whole day. You will not get that. No one does. And everyone wants it.

So the engagement photo trend is terrible. Horrible. And the corollary to that trend is the tablescape trend.

Maria Killam, who is great, and who picked out all the colors for my house that I love, came to my house to visit and started talking about tablescapes. She said they are a huge right now and I need them.

As far as I can tell, they are tsotskes draped all over the surfaces in one’s house. They are arrangements of objects that could not withstand normal family life, for people who do not have a normal family life. Tablescapes look like wishscapes – that is, a mélange of junk that someone thinks expresses why they are special. (Country Living is full of this stuff, overpriced New York custom-made furniture capped with farm-fetish crap to give a room a rich-but-down-to-earth feel.)

The whole trend reeks of fakery. Just like the staged engagement photos. I often get on my high horse about fakery. I call everyone out on it because I think I’m the queen of coming clean about everything. But the people closest to me are able to call me out on my own fakery.

For instance, I’ll use Xanax for my problems, but I can’t do Xanax all the time or I’d be a narcotic addict. And anyway, I have to save Xanax for when the Farmer wants sex and I’m stuck, curled up in a ball.

Don’t tell me I shouldn’t take a Xanax to have sex, okay? I’m still very fun after just one pill, and I don’t even know if the Farmer can tell the difference. And don’t tell me to meditate instead, because the best meditating I ever do is when I’m on Xanax. Time really goes by fast that way. I can really sit still.

So I’m trying to decide how to manage my problems best: Meditation or medication? I have tried a wide range of medication, but I miss having a mind that races. Do you know how many blog post ideas I have in one day? Ten. Twenty if you count the bad ones. It’s just that I’m too scattered to write one every day.

In hindsight, my racing brain is a big reason I moved from New York City to a farm. Here's what I took a photo of the last time I went to New York City: It's me trying to get visual peace so I can think.

I think I chose to have calmness around me on a farm so I can focus on the craziness in my head.

You can say that this is not functional, but I think this is how most people have wild success in their career. By letting their brain be wild. It’s a choice.

But the people around me might be getting sick of it. And I have had enough comments on this blog from kids whose parents were crazy for me to know that no kid wants a parent whose mind is racing about stuff that is not the kids.

But it’s so hard to give up having a brain that goes nonstop through rants and tirades and ten hours of work in ten minutes. It’s hard to give that up to be a medicated, normal, kind, accommodating, person.

And now, we come full circle. Because I’m telling you that I like being different. Like the people in the engagement photos. I don’t really want that; anyone who thinks they are special is on the road to hell. Because feeling special is just a way to avoid doing the things that most people do to fix the problems that you have.

One way to get ideas about how to do what others do to fix your problems is to find a coach. The New Yorker has a great article about how everyone needs coaching. It’s a surgeon writing about how weird it is that surgeons don’t have coaches and what he does in order to find one for himself. (I honestly feel like the undertone of the article is that, like most surgeons, he has too big an ego to get coaching, and what he really wants is a writing coach, because like most surgeons, he wants to be great at everything.)

But the article is instructive in that we each need a coach in order to get what we want. He has good evidence about that. And I can see that when I coach people it’s so easy to see what they should be doing, so I can understand how I should have a coach for myself, as well.

If I were my own coach, I’d look at the discrepancy between what I say I want and what I’m doing.  I say I want to be calm, but what I’m doing is getting worked up about engagement photos and making a living linking to stuff I hate. This is not really the action of someone who wants to be calm.

I want to be calm for my kids but not so calm that the rest of my life is boring.

You must be wondering what I’m learning in couples therapy. I mean, we go there twice a week. We must be learning something, right? What we are learning is how to calm ourselves down in the moment.

The guy is Don Ferguson, and he wrote this book, and one of his specialties is couples who have some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder attached to them. I think we have that. Probably in both of us. I mean, the Farmer worked on his parents’ farm for 40 years and then they gave their farm to their daughters’ kids instead of the Farmer. While he was still working on the farm. I think that’s a sign that he has had a hard time for a long time.

So, in our therapy, we learn how to calm ourselves down in the middle of whatever we are doing. And while I like to think that the Farmer is emotionally retarded and I’m just going to couples therapy for him to get his shit together, the truth is that I have a lot of the same problems he does.

One of  which is that I can get worked up about anything. Because I think it’s interesting. But I need to be able to stop it quickly if the people around me don’t like it.

So I am choosing meditation over medication. I like the idea of being able to calm down for people I love, but to be not calm for me. I have had my head racing for so long that it’s sort of my comfort zone.

I called Jeanenne, and who knows what she was doing, but she stopped whatever it was, and bought me a flyswatter and drove it to my house. She is my big city same-day service in Darlington.

The first half a year I lived on the farm, Jeanenne realized that what I really needed though, was a tutor for how to act in the country and a shoulder to cry on.

When the Farmer told me to leave, it wasn’t the first time, but it was the worst time, and I took the kids to her house. Just for dinner.

When things calmed down enough so that I knew I was staying, she helped me create an org chart of who is related to who in the area (everyone is related somehow) and she even kept me abreast of essential gossip like which husband found his wife in bed with another guy. (Note about the country: In the city, gossip is the term for rumor and trash talk. In the country, gossip is confirmed truth.)

Once I was here long enough to know who I want to be friends with (I love the school principal, for example) I did not need Jeanenne for social navigation.

But I needed her for stuff like going to the DMV, and taking the kids to Madison when I couldn’t handle doing the drive three days in a row for my six-year-old son’s dance recital rehearsals. (Hip hop. By the way. And I know I’m really old when kids are learning dance routines to the Beastie Boys.)

And, now that Melissa is gone, Jeanenne has started taking pictures.

This one is my older son at the pool. But, don’t worry, Melissa still has her hands in the photos on this blog. She edited the photo. So, it’s official: it takes four people to write a blog post on my blog. I have me, the writer, plus my copy editor, a photographer, and now a photo editor. I’m just letting you know, in case you think you want a blog like mine. You probably don’t. Mainstream media dominates blogging now, and my little site of four people masquerading as one is nothing compared to say, Pioneer Woman’s site as two, full-fledged web agencies masquerading as one person.)

This is all to say that what Jeanenne does really well is to adapt to the reality of her job. She never says, “That’s not what I was hired for,” (which, by the way, is one of the five worst things you can do to kill your career.) She never assumes that her job will continue unchanged as reality changes around her.

Look at this photo.

We eat three meals as a family, at the dinner table, every day. I cook all the meals, and most of the time I am cooking all farm-rasied food, which is the case in this photo. Pretty nice, huh?

Here’s another thing I could tell you about this photo. The meat is corned beef because the farmer made a deal to split a cow with someone who took all the good parts of the cow since they figured I don’t know what I’m doing with cooking a cow, so the bad parts were so bad that all we could do was make corned beef out of them.

And I could tell you that I don’t eat meals with the family. I can’t tell if it’s Aspergers (most people with Aspergers like to do something while they eat – so sitting with other people eating is always unpleasant.) Or maybe it has to do with bulimia (I was hospitalized for it and I never seem to shake the sense that I should only be eating stuff I can throw up.) But either way, scientists have found that hunger makes people feel better, so maybe I’m on the right track.

I could also tell you that I had to fight forever to get those plates. I didn’t even want these plates. I lived with my grandma growing up because my parents were total fuckups and my favorite dishes of hers were white and pink with blue flowers. I used them for my sweet-sixteen birthday party that was formal and stuffy in a way that only a girl living with her grandma could have. But I loved the dishes and when my grandma asked me what jewelry of hers I wanted, I told her I wanted the pink and white dishes. Besides, I knew the good jewelry was going to my grandma’s only daughter. It turned out the pink and white dishes were going to the only daughter as well.

So I moped for fifteen years, or maybe my whole life, that I lived with my grandma because my mom didn’t want me but I was never as important as my grandma’s real daughter.

When I saw that my dad inherited the other dishes, the blue and white dishes, and his new wife didn’t like them, I asked for them. The dishes go well at the farm.

You could see that in the picture. Or you could see our perfect, farm-family life.

This is true for everyone. Everyone can look perfect or they can look terrible. And it’s true for every job, as well. Every boss. Every co-worker.

It’s a pretty safe bet that we all live our lives somewhere between the perfect and the terrible. And nothing is really really good always. But there is still sometimes. Because the really really good parts exist only in brief moments.

So when you think you need to switch jobs, or switch cities, or switch spouses, or switch any of the other bazillion things that you might feel are not as good as they should be, remind yourself that your job, your family, and even your dinners are probably pretty much the same as everyone else’s. And remind yourself to enjoy those brief, really, really good parts.

Also, I'm a fanatic about routine. After years of obsessive research about what makes people happy, I have determined that self-discipline is the key to happiness. And self-discipline is really difficult, but not in the context of routine. So I love routine and I hate vacations because they disrupt routine.

So I was surprised when the Hampton Inn offered me free nights in any hotel if I would write about it. After all, it's not just that I don't like vacations. Also, I'm the person who wrote about why I think travel is a waste of time, and one of the most popular posts on this blog about vacations is why it's okay to work during vacation.

But now that I am basically raising farm boys, I am careful to take them to the city so they know what it's like. Digression: I have heard that one of the biggest problems the Ivy League has with attracting kids from rural America is the rural kids with high enough test scores simply can't handle living in a city – yes, New Haven counts as a city to a farm kid. So while you are sending your kids to SAT tutors to get your kids into college, I'll be sending my kids to ride NYC subways.

So, back to the hotel. I used the free offer this week to stay in the Skokie, IL Hampton Inn while I was at Suzuki cello camp with my son. That's right. This is my idea of vacation for my kid. He's only six years old, so he doesn't know other kids are going to Disney World.

We do five hours of cello lessons during the day, and then we come back to our hotel. And I have to say, he totally loves the hotel.

The whole day is very structured for my son. So when we come back, I let him do whatever he wants until bed time.

First we swim.

Then he tracks pool water through the lobby to get some lemonade and a cookie. The hotel staff is totally kid friendly, though I can't help wondering if someone told them to be extra nice to us.

When I lived in New York City, I didn't ever cook a meal, which is normal for NYC.  But on the farm, I cook three meals a day. And like I said, I like routine. So I asked for a room with a kitchen. I had grand plans for nice dinners, just me and my son (and Melissa for one night). But he reminded me that I told him he could choose what we do after camp, and he chose peanut butter & jelly. Every night.

He practices after dinner at home, so we did that here, too. It's amazing how if you tell a kid that practice is every night, and you follow through with that plan, then the kid doesn't think to get out of it even though he's played already for five hours.

I've been thinking about this all week – how routine is the most powerful tool for creating self-discipline. But I find that when it comes to myself, I lack the self-discipline to stick to the routine that would increase my self-discipline.

I'm better at routine when it comes to my kids.

By bedtime, I am exhausted.

All week I've been thinking I'm going to write a blog post after I put him to sleep. Because I love my job. And I feel  disoriented on days when I don't do it.

But, look. It's been a week since I posted. I find that if I lay down with him for a book before bed, there is no getting me out when the last page is read.

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.