We have been saying this in Brazen Careerist board meetings for about five months. The conversation goes something like this:

Board member: How is the blog redesign going?

Me: Um. I'm thinking.

Board member: That's what you said two months ago.

Me: Yeah. That's true. I'll get some bids.

Board member: It's important the we differentiate the Brazen Careerist brand of the company from the brand of you.

Me: Yeah. I get it.

Then we have a pause in the meeting while everyone is silently frustrated with my inability to make changes.

The truth is that I have always known that I'm going to separate myself from the name Brazen Careerist. I mean, I don't want to be the Brazen Careerist when I'm 70 years old. And anyway, the brand is better for a social network.

So, it's time to take it off my blog. But I'm slow. I'm so slow that I am doing incremental changes as a warm up. And, also, as a way to make the board think that I am not constipated.

So the first change is that I added a section on my blog sidebar titled: My life disguised as career advice. And the list in that section contains topics that make sense for my blog, if it is separate from Brazen Careerist.

I think I will keep rejiggering my sidebar categories. I'm sick of the categories I have had. What's up with time management being a separate category from productivity anyway? What was I thinking?

The other change is that I have agreed to do weekly, live video chats. I want to tell you they will happen at the same time every week, but my life is not so streamlined. Fortunately, Ed, our CEO, who is all over me to start doing these video chats, has come up with the idea that the banner ad on my blog, which surely none of you even notices because it never changes, will now announce the weekly topic and the weekly time.

Frankly, I'm more excited about changing my categories, but I'm also excited about making Ed happy. I have found in my career that the only time I have a good job is when the person who manages me is happy with me. So that's the topic of this week's video chat, Managing Up: How to make your boss love you.

You can sign up here.

Comment on: The nuts and bolts of building a brand

The farmer is going through a midlife crisis. It’s not really a midlife crisis, though. As an expert on the process of coming of age in one’s twenties, I’d have to say that the farmer is actually going through a quarterlife crisis.

Typically, one’s twenties, a period now called emerging adulthood, looks something like this:

Learning to separate from parents.
Figuring out where one fits in the world of work.
Getting ready to be married and have kids.

The farmer is doing those things in compressed time: the two years since I have known him. Many people think it was totally crazy that he sent an email to me, out of the blue. But in hindsight it’s clear that he knew he needed something to kick-start his quarterlife crisis. And when you are already forty and have not had one, you need something as cataclysmic as a girl from New York coming to the farm and shaking things up.

The farmer is on the sofa. I had to convince him to let me come here because there is a snowstorm coming. The snow is a big deal if you have a thousand animals out in freezing weather and can’t get food to them. I am not going to go into all the details of the stresses of winter farming. Mostly because I don’t know them. But I do know that every time there is a lot of snow, something freezes and it always seems to be life threatening: Like water for the pigs.

As a reward to the farmer for trying to cope with the snow and me at the same time, I brought him a snowstorm’s supply of lox and bagels. (Note: You can’t say he’s not a fast learner. He told me the other day he saw someone eating lox and bagels like a sandwich instead of on two bagels side-by-side and he knew it was not the right way to eat it.)

And I brought pie. The farmer used to be haughty about food. Haughty, like, wondering why everyone can’t eat grass-fed beef and homegrown vegetables at every meal and have 10% body fat and be able to leap fences one after another. Now that he has to manage reading on the sofa with me at the same time as thinking about the cows trudging through snow to get to the silage (I don’t even know what silage really means, but I know I’m using it correctly), there is a higher stress level in his life. Now he has to think about if he left enough time between fixing fences and eating dinner to play Sorry! with the kids (A digressive tip: Cheat so that the game goes faster. The farmer never cheats. Which creates even more stress, from boredom.)

So I bring him pie, and I love eating pie because, as the mother of two boys who is almost always on the edge of an anxiety breakdown, I eat lots of carbs. I used to feel bad but then the farmer, who always seems to come across new research about the age-old problem of how to eat less pie, found this book, How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. It’s a great book, and I don’t think Lehrer would mind me calling him an almost-Malcolm Gladwell. Lehrer can put all the research together in fun ways, but he can’t synthesize it into a fascinating, overarching thesis like Gladwell often does.

So the farmer is reading Lehrer's book, and he tells me about a study where researchers gave people either long or short numbers to remember, and then they sent the person down the hall and gave them a choice of a piece of fruit or chocolate cake. The people who had the long, difficult numbers to remember picked the cake at a much higher rate.

So that’s where we are, at the farm, on the sofa. I am asking the farmer to do long numbers. It’s not just that he has to go through a quarterlife crisis in order to get married. But he also has to accept that he used to have the life of someone asked to remember only short numbers: the farm is stable, steady, paid for, and he’s been doing it so long he could do it in his sleep. So with no stress, he was always able to pick fruit instead of cake.

Now, with me and the kids in the mix, he has to do things like come home from thawing the pig water to hear me tell him that the flies in the house are not normal, even for a farm, and there is something going on in the walls and I can’t live in a house that is fly-infested.

Me bringing the pie is like saying, you can’t get out of fixing the flies, but at least you can have your favorite carbohydrate delivery system to make up for the stress I’m causing you.

He is still not convinced, by the way. Forget that I already told the world that we’re getting married. We are not. Who knows what we’re doing–I also told the world that we are broken up. We are not that either. The only thing we are definitely doing is reading Linchpin on the sofa on the farm in the quietest time of year.

He hears me turn a page and asks me to tell him what I’m learning. Here’s what I’m learning: If you are a really hard worker and you have perseverance and people are completely charmed by you, then you are indispensible in your work. I am that. I would not say I’m completely charming, but I am charming enough so that I do not get fired when I am difficult.

The farmer is not indispensible. I am not allowed to write about why this is. But he has agreed that I can write that he is clearly not a linchpin on the farm, the way it is set up now.

So we talk about how Seth Godin says that people should strive to be linchpins. And Seth spends 300 pages telling us what it means to be a Linchpin and why it’s important. The farmer’s head is on one end of the sofa and my head is on the other, and our legs are intertwined in the middle, and I have to shift my knee when I want to see if the farmer is insulted when I suggest that I’m a Linchpin and he’s not.

He is not insulted. We agree that if he would commit to being married, then he’d be a Linchpin to me and my sons. But he is still deciding.

And here comes my review of Seth’s book: He is right. Of course. Seth is always right. The problem with all of Seth’s books is that he sets the bar so high with every one of them. For example, The Dip is probably the book that I depended on most to get me through the point when my company, Brazen Careerist, ran out of money. I thought I was going to die. And chapters in The Dip would remind me that if we'd keep going, we’d get through it.

So Seth was right, but I am not sure I could get through it again. It was scary. It was gut wrenching, and it was terrible for my kids. Not very many people can get through a dip, for real.

The same is true with Seth's book, Tribes. It’s a great life goal—to have big ideas that people want to follow, and you are a leader by giving people strength in numbers to instigate change through ideas. That’s great, if you have the ideas and you can get a following. As a blogger who is asked all the time about how to get more followers, I have this advice to give you: Cancel your whole life if you want to attract a tribe, because it is absolutely a full-time job, and you have to give your whole heart and soul to that tribe in order to receive, in return, a following.

So that’s two things that Seth’s right about that are extremely hard to get yourself to decide to actually do. I think Linchpin is another. It’s totally obvious to me (and the farmer) that it’s more important for him to have a job where he is the Linchpin—keeping a family together—than it is for him to just keep coasting along in the job he has. Which means he has to figure out what he likes in his current situation and what he wants to change.

But change is hard. And usually small change (remembering a longer number sequence)  begets bigger change (eating chocolate cake even if you don’t usually do that) so that you always get scared that you don’ t know when change will stop.

The farmer says, “Let’s go to bed.” I used to think he goes to bed really early because he’s a farmer. But I’ve seen him stay up late for a movie, and he’s just fine. So really, “Let’s go to bed,” means, “If I have to hear you talk about complicated stuff for one more minute I’m going to need another piece of pie.”

Of all his books, I am hoping that this is the one where all Seth’s readers will, en masse, finally decide they must rise to the standard that Seth’s preaching. Of course, I hope at least the farmer will read the book and decide he must be a Linchpin and then, I move to the farm with my kids.

So when he gets off the sofa, I leave Linchpin there in the center, so he can’t miss it, but upside down, so he doesn’t think I’m preaching.

Comment on: Almost a review of Seth Godin's book, Linchpin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

37% of arguments are about money

24% are about household chores

15% are about in-laws

13% are about sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comment on: Check-up for self-delusion

1. Face the problem and make it a priority.
I used to think anger management problem is a thing for men who are in prison for setting their wives on fire. Now I see it’s a problem for people who think they will get fired for being unpleasant. Or for people who think their kids will grow up and hate them for being emotionally unpredictable.

I am both those people.

2. Focus on your trigger points.
The time I most consistently lose my temper is trying to get the kids out of the house in the morning. So I told myself to not lose my temper.

That didn’t work.

So I have been waking up at 5:30 because I need to give myself two hours to be completely organized and calm so that I can get the kids and myself out the door for school and work at 7:30 without screaming at the kids for not eating fast enough because I changed my clothes for work three times and got behind and forgot to make lunches.

I thought of having the nanny come in the morning to help me. But I hate feeling like I’m married to the nanny, and I hate feeling like I can’t do normal parenting things on my own. The mornings with the kids seem theoretically intimate, and making school lunches seems like a rite of passage for moms with school-aged kids. I want all that.

3. Use deep breathing to regulate stress.
I have been doing Ashtanga yoga for ten years. I thought I was amazing at yoga, but now I see that the point of yoga, calming, centering, whatever, is lost on someone who is focusing on the routine of  fifty push-ups and five headstands. Now the breathing resonates with me, when I do it at 5:30 am as a desperate attempt to keep myself calm long enough to get to work.

3. Have a regular sleep schedule to improve your ability to self-regulate.
I pack the school lunches the night before. And I pick out my clothes the night before. The guys I work with think I don’t ever change my clothes. This is sometimes true. Especially when I’m depressed. But a lot of times I change my clothes but all my clothes look the same so I don’t even get credit for having thought about it the night before.

To get up at 5:30 am with a good night’s sleep I have to go to bed at 9:30pm which means I have to get the kids to bed by 8pm so I can have an hour to do lunches and clothes and washing my face, which, if you are my age, takes ten minutes because of all the cream stuff I use.

I do not explain this when a co-worker asks why I don’t have twenty minutes to fix home page copy at 8:30 pm.

4. Accept that every day includes unpredictability, and that’s okay.
So it’s a regular day where I am insanely regimented in a desperate effort to not be angry but at 7am I realize that I forgot to pack to go to the farmer’s house. I also realize that it’s freezing outside, and I didn’t put the car in the garage and it’s going to take ten minutes of warming up the car so I can scrape the ice.

Then my seven-year-old can’t find socks without holes in them.

I change my clothes so I can scrape the ice and I yell from my bedroom that he should look in his brother’s drawer for socks.

He yells back up that he wants me to sew the socks so that we are not wasting. “It’s recycling,” he yells.

5. Understand the true source of your frustration.
Then the boys have a fist-fight about who is wearing whose socks. I do not catch them until there’s a cheek scrape which upsets me because now my four-year-old will go to school looking like he lives in a boxing ring.

I have prepared myself for a moment like this: I identify that I am not upset with my sons but upset with what the world thinks of me as a parent. I tell myself I am good at self-regulation and I do not take this frustration out on my children.

I say, “Put on nice socks and let’s have breakfast.” I want to tell you I used a calm voice, but I worry I used a psycho, calm-before-the-storm voice.

6. Understand the impact food has on your moods.
I make waffles. I watch the kids eat squishy, warm, covered-in-syrup waffles. I watch them wash down the drippy syrup with marsh-mallowed hot chocolate. I am convinced that when I eat sugar and bread it makes me crazy–that I just want more and then cannot think of anything else.  (There is such interesting research on this. Click here: A study about how civilization is based on the opiate effect of grains on humans.) It takes every bit of self-discipline in my body not to steal scraps of waffle from the four-year-old’s plate. I need to remember to not give him so much. I need him to feel more protective of his portion.

7. Use solutions-based language in tense conversations.
I want so much to be remembered as a dream mom that I put their mittens and coats over the heater so they are warm after breakfast.

The kids don't notice warmness because they are punching each other, furtively, like I’m not going to see them if it’s under their jackets.

As we walk out the door, my seven-year-old starts crying: the snow pants in his backpack are wrong.

I tell him those are to keep at school. I tell him I am streamlining our morning by keeping snow pants at school so we don’t have to bring them back and forth.

He does not like his other pair. He is crying. I decide I am going to take a firm line because really, it’s school that makes him nervous and he finds something to cry about every morning and I have to put a stop to this.

I tell him I already made a decision about the pants. I tell him I am the mom and I already made a decision. This is good. Kids feel secure when they have boundaries and authority.

He screams.

I pound the refrigerator with my fist.

I scream, “Shut the fuck up with the crying.”

I scream, “If you don’t quit crying every fucking single morning I’m never taking you to school again.”

That’s how it is. Nearly 24 hours of preparation to get through a morning without me yelling, and still, I break thirty rules of anger management in thirty seconds.

My four-year-old says, “Mommy, you’re hurting me.” And he covers his ears.

8. Slow down a tough situation so you make good decisions.
I take a time-out for myself in the living room. I say a prayer to the god of anger, if there is one: please let me always pound the refrigerator and not my kids.

I take them to school. I kiss them too much when I say goodbye. I tell them I love them like my life depends on it, while other moms, who clearly do not worry about yelling and maybe don’t even worry about waffles, casually do drop-off and drive off to the gym.

Then I go to work, and everyone is laughing and joking about Pee Wee Herman’s new show, and I yell, “Arrrggh! Can everyone please shut up for twenty minutes so I can finish my post? I can’t think with all the banter.”

Ryan Paugh tells me that it’s not that I can’t work with talking. I work with talking all the time. He says, “It’s self-loathing. Take some responsibility.”

I want to tell him to fuck off. But I need a quiet place to write this post, so I go to his office, and sit on the floor, and I hope he doesn’t talk to me, because it’s 8:30 am and already I am not having a good anger management day.

Comment on: 8 Tips for anger management

Here is why I think that:

Recently, Gretchen Rubin sent me her new book, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

Let me tell you now, I am not a huge fan of the book. She is writing about her life, but her life is not all that interesting. The thing about reading stories about people's lives is that we like conflict. That’s what every novel is, it’s what every memoir is. If there’s no conflict then there is no path to follow in a story line.

Gretchen’s conflict in this story about her is how can she be happier. Gretchen reports that she is already happy. She has an investment banker husband, two seemingly just fine daughters, a nice apartment in Manhattan, former-model good looks, etc. She basically (as she says in her forward to the book) needs something to talk about at cocktail parties. So she is writing a book so she can talk about it.

What I realized, though, is that while Gretchen's conflict doesn’t make for great reading, it is good to surround yourself with people like Gretchen: People who are basically happy and want to talk about it. Because happiness is contagious. So I kept reading the book. And, you know what? I didn't love the book, but I love that it made me think a lot more about the stuff she wrote about.

(Not that New York City is the place to be happy, by the way. It’s not. It’s not because people in NYC value being interesting over being happy  – which probably presents a special problem to Gretchen at cocktail parties, but I won’t go into that. Also, it’s clear that happy people attract happy people because Live Science reports that people in New York City are more unhappy than the rest of the country.)

Tiziana Casciaro, professor at University of Toronto, does really interesting research about social skills. And one thing she told me is that it's very hard to gauge your own progress in the social skills department, but if you are making a conscious effort to improve your social skills then it is a safe bet that they are, on some level, improving.

And there is research that if you focus on something every day, by either writing it down every day, or at least committing to prioritizing it each day – you are much more likely to achieve that.

I think the same is true about happiness. If you pay attention to the research, whether or not you consciously implement it, the mere act of accessing the information is commitment enough to instigate change in your happiness level. (You can type "happiness" into the search box on the sidebar of my blog to find the results of my own obsessive collection of research on this topic.)

The other thing that should make you want to talk about happiness and read about happiness is that to think that you can affect your own happiness is a fundamentally positive step. Optimism about the future is a keystone of happiness. And people who think they have control over the outcome of their life — that they are the locus of control — are happier.

If you say all the happiness research is tiresome and circular – which I have said before – it might be true, but thinking that way actually does not improve your happiness. (Although it does probably make your more interesting, because conflict and cynicism are interesting.)

Sonja Lyubomirsky, psychology professor at the University of California-Riverside, wrote a great book on all the tiny little things you can do to make yourself happier on a daily basis. The book is The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. It's an inspiring book because the things we can do are so small, like, give someone a surprise compliment.  But you don't need to do that today. And neither do I. Because I think, for today, getting to the end of this post counts.

Comment on: You can be happier by reading this post

Here are some of my most popular posts about figuring out where to live:

• I'm moving out of New York City
• How much money do you need to be happy? Hint: Your sex life matters more
• 5 Steps for taming materialism from an accidental expert
• Don't wait til you bottom out before you make a big change
• How to decide where to live

Also, when I moved to Madison, I founded the company Brazen Careerist, which is funded by investor groups in Madison, WI and Washington, DC. Then I wrote this post:

Starting a company in Silicon Valley is stupid

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy the blog!

-Penelope

Comment on: Welcome, San Francisco Chronicle Readers

I thought it was insane that she was there. She was so smart. She was going to be great at work. Her only problem was that her fiancée had just broken off their engagement. I thought she would be fine—there are so many other men to be had. But before I could ask her to explain, she tried to electrocute herself in the bathtub, with a blow-drier, and she was moved to the high-security ward.

That has been on my mind as my relationship with the farmer has unraveled.

Which makes me want to sleep.

I kiss my sons good night and then walk through a kitchen full of dirty dishes to my bedroom, thinking going to bed would be a good way to escape. But I can’t sleep. Probably because I used that trick earlier, when I came home from work and slept for a couple of hours before I took my son to cello.

I was not sad while I slept. But I was sad at cello.

Even since our first date, the farmer has said that he does not want to date me, but he does it anyway. Over eighteen months, we pretend things have changed, but really, here’s where we are:

The farmer owns about 100 acres on his own. He farms with his parents by putting his 100 acres with their 500 acres.

His parents have said that he will inherit the whole farm so he can keep farming the way he has, on 600 acres, for the last 20 years.

They do not want to guarantee that the farmer inherits the land. They say maybe they will give the farmer a guaranteed inheritance after they see if they like farming with him when he lives with me. They want to wait to see if I make their life hell.

I finally fall asleep and wake up to my seven-year-old saying, “Can you wake up? Is it morning? Can you ask [the farmer] if we can also have sheep when we move to the farm?”

“It’s not morning yet,” is what I tell him.

“Then can I sleep with you? And where is [the farmer]?”

“He’s not here.”

This is what I say. I’m not sure how long I can say it with any credibility. But luckily it’s the middle of the night, and my son is consumed with the idea of doing animal chores every morning with the farmer. My son has plans.

I lay in bed between my sons who realize something is wrong because ever since the farmer came into our lives, I’ve guarded my bed from them relentlessly, but tonight I let them in.

In bed I think about the farmer’s lawyer who says depending on farming land that the parents control is a totally insecure way to live. Our days with the lawyer are over, though. It cost the farmer $5000 and he has, literally, nothing to show for it. Only discussions with the lawyer about how the farmer has to leave his farm.

I lay in bed staring at the dark ceiling. The boys breathe heavy and warm in my ears and tears drip down my cheeks and when they pool in my ears they are cold. I tell myself over and over again that the farmer does not want to farm on his own land without farming with his parents. I have to accept this.

He asked me to move to his farm, with my kids, living alongside the risk that his parents will tell him that they hate me so much that he either has to get rid of me or stop farming with them.

So I won’t move there. Because I think that if the parents, down the line, hate me enough to force the farmer to choose me or the farm, he’ll choose the farm. So I figure he should just make that choice now, before I move to Darlington, WI with my kids.

And he’s picking the farm.

Did you see the movie Monsters vs Aliens? The girl who turns into a monster breaks off her engagement because her fiancée is a jerk. I wish I could become a monster. I wish I thought the farmer was a jerk. I wish this were a movie, and my kids scratched the disc, so we’d have to stop watching, because the end of this is too scary.

The next morning, I wake up at 5am because I’ve been waking up on farmer time for so long. I sulk for an hour and then the kids wake up. I make lunches, make breakfast, make beds, make jokes (the knock-knock kind) and the kids are happy, and it makes me feel like I’m doing something right.

I went to the book fair at the school the night before. We take out one of our new books and I think maybe the kids are having a charmed life and I am overestimating the impact of farmer abandonment.

Then my four-year-old says, “Mom. Look!” and he shows me an eraser in the shape of an ice cream cone.

“Did you take that from the book fair?”

“Yes. Aren’t I sneaky?”

“No. It’s stealing. I told you we’re only buying books. That means you can’t take anything else.”

We talk about stealing. My seven-year-old asks with eyes full of glee if his brother will be going to jail.

We finish breakfast and I tell myself not to think about the farmer. I tell myself to focus on making the returning of the eraser a good lesson about fairness.

I would like the farmer to sell his 100 acres to his parents, who are willing to pay cash for market price, and then buy a farm somewhere else, so that we start fresh, together. I told him I’d move anywhere in the world that he wants.

He wants to stay right there. With his parents.

In the car, on the way to school, I tell myself it’s hard to be sad over losing someone who is choosing to farm with his parents over starting a life with me. But I'm distraught over telling my kids that the guy they have completely bonded with is going to disappear.

Proving that kids know everything, even stuff they don’t understand, my seven-year-old catches me off guard with his backseat chatter: “Who is coming to your birthday party next week?”

My four-year-old chimes in with a list of his own friends.

I say, “You two are my best friends. So I think it’ll be a party with us.”

The seven-year-old says, “What about [the farmer]? You love him, too, and he loves you.”

I turn the music up too loud.

I need to find some child psychologist to tell me how to tell the kids what happened to the farmer. So when they clamor for the Beatles I put on Ob La Di, Ob La Da, and the kids sing out loud. When I have been pretending that things are fine with the farmer, Ob la di seemed like Paul McCartney’s sunny summary of marriage and kids. Now the song feels like John Lennon’s ironic jab at the morons who think marriage ever works out to be happy.

I drop the kids off. Psychology Today says that depression is contagious and you usually get it from your mom, so I try to be extra chirpy during drop off. Except when we are returning the eraser.

I only go into my office when I have to, and today I have to because we are having an all-day meeting with the CEO who has flown in from DC.

We are talking strategy and he says that startups are always changing. The strategy changes, the tactics change. He says it has happened at every startup he’s ever had.

I console myself that he’s had two, huge exits. I hope that the rule of past performance predicting future performance will skew more toward his former exits than mine.

I try to focus. I wonder if they can tell when I am thinking about the farmer and when I am thinking about the company. Sometimes, when I think I cannot get myself back to thinking about the company, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I try to say smart things every now and then. I want them to think I’m smart.

I hope I am an exception to the rule. For broken engagements. For single parenting. For startup exits.

But I know that none of us is an exception to a rule. We are just regular. And another rule is that we are all lost sometimes, and being lost is okay. I am lost right now. I don’t know what is happening in my life, and I am scared to think of any of the reasonable outcomes.

But I actually know a bit about being lost. I’ve been through it before. I have been jobless, and I’ve figured out what’s next. I’ve hated my career, and I figured out how to switch. I’ve been dumped many times by many men, and I’ve always thought no one would ever love me, and I always fall in love again.

But there's no magic solution. Being lost cannot be avoided. The best thing to do is to try to focus on something else. I know from past experience what works: Reading, writing, cuddling with the kids, dating men who write good emails, and cooking recipes that call for lots of sprinkles.

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

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

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

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

I tell the DMV lady I filled out my form.

She looks to see if I filled in everything.

She says that I left the second part blank.

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

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

“I do?”

“Yes. Do you have it?”

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

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

“Oh. Um. I thought I had it.”

I have to go home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She says, “Hello again.”

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

Hello again.

Hello.

Do you like my hat?

I do not.

Goodbye again.

Goodbye.

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

So I say, “Hello.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She says, “Not long at all.”

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

She says, “Five minutes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She says, “What number?”

I hand her my slip.

She says, “These are all letters.”

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

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

I watch. And then it’s my turn.

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

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

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

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

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

I say, “Can I pay it now?”

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If you are excited about business travel, thinking it’s a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from a cynical traveler will make life easier for you.

1. Stick with your priorities. When people travel to another city, why do they throw out their to do list for sightseeing in random museums? If you have on your top three things you want in life: go to the gym, stay in touch with friends, read a book a week, then sightseeing is not on the list. You don’t need to do it when you travel. You need to stick to your priorities. If sightseeing is on your priority list, then get a new job, because you have no control over where you sightsee if you have a job with a lot of travel.

2. Eat really well. First of all, you’re not paying for your own food, so you should eat really good, healthy food, which is always more expensive than junk food. Second, if you have a rule for yourself that you always eat well when you travel, then you will actually be healthier from traveling. Most people eat crap when they travel because they are tired and they feel like the calories don’t count because they are across state lines. That attitude will make you burn out faster. I can’t find a link but I’m sure there’s a study to support the hypothesis that you deal with the stress of travel more effectively without McDonald’s.

3. Think of balance in terms of weeks, not days. I know I want to spend time with the Farmer, spend time with the kids, be around for dinner invitations, and tooth-fairy moments. I used to worry about this every day. If I didn’t have breakfast with the kids, then I had to have dinner. Now I think in terms of weeks. If I was gone all week, I take off a day from work to have extra time for my personal life. If you are good at your job, and you travel a lot, no one counts how many days you take off.

4. Get elite status. Somewhere. Anywhere. When everyone is staying overnight at O’Hare, the people who are platinum are getting rebooked first. When you are waiting on the tarmac for an hour at LaGuardia because air traffic control cannot remember how many planes are in the air (which, really, is like, every day) if you get upgraded to first class, you’re drinking free wine and eating firm grapes while you are a prisoner of the airport. To get elite status, it means that every time your company wants to save $50 to put you on another airline, you have to say no. If my company will save more than $300, I’ll travel on an airline that I am not platinum on. Make sure your company knows you’re doing them a favor.

5. Do not agree to stupid meetings for geographical reasons. Just because someone you never want to hang out with lives in Saskatchewan and you’re gonna be there doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you should hang out with him. You have a life. And you surely have stuff you can do that evening besides hang out with a loser. Or maybe he’s only a half-loser. The thing is, you don’t have time for half-losers at home. They are the same everywhere: Still just a distraction from the real work of living the life you want.

The bottom line is that you need to  respect your life. Your life cannot be on hold while you travel. The travel, if it’s really frequent, sort of is your life. So the values you have—be spiritual, be frugal, be healthy—have to prevail during your travel. This is not vacation travel. This is not a vacation from your life. Business travel IS your life.

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Most of the time we actually have the knowledge we need to solve a problem, but we don't like reality, so we pretend to not have the knowledge.

This reminds me of the bazillion times I've told someone to take the Myers Briggs test. I think everyone should take it so you know your natural strengths and weaknesses. But most people already have an idea of who they want to be based on what their parents have told them about who they should be. And so almost most people are shocked and a little disappointed when they get their Myers Briggs score. Reality is almost never what we think it is when it comes to assessing ourselves.

So most people live in denial about their personality profile. I did that. I thought I was a writer even when I kept scoring as an ENTJ. But if you are an ENTJ, you need to do something much bigger than writing a book all by yourself, because you need some people to boss around. Or at least some people to leverage to get a bigger book written, like maybe the encyclopedia. So I pretended to not be an ENTJ by pretending that I was really one of those super creative people trapped in corporate America. But you know what? I love corporate America. I love the game part of it.

Okay. So this is how you solve any problem in your life: Admit the reality of your life.

Let's use procrastination as an example. I spend a lot of time dissecting my procrastination habit. I am a great list maker. And I'm great at prioritizing. And then I do something that is not at the top of my priority list. And then I have a messed up day because I don't get my important stuff done. And, on a large scale, of course, this is a messed up life.

I realized that a lot of times I procrastinate because I'm scared that something won't work. Like, I should have gotten a spray tan a long time ago because it makes me look thinner and then I can eat more cookies with cellulite impunity. But I was super nervous to do the tanning.

So I tell myself that mistakes are okay. And the more mistakes I am willing to make in my life, the less procrastinating I will do: Mental gymnastics help me, I think.

I also realized that sometimes procrastination is okay. It's a sign that I'm not ready to do something. So here, I am linking to a post I love, about my son being born deformed, and I don't link to that one enough. You should read it. Anyway, I realized—while I was writing that post—that procrastination can actually be a learning tool if you listen to your heart and stop beating yourself up.

But then there are other times when I am not listening to my heart. Instead, I eat bagels. This is what I am working on now. I am trying to figure out why I have to eat each time something is hard. This is not good. If nothing else, there's a limit to how much you can compensate for with a spray tan.

So I have been noticing how when I switch from one task to another, I want to eat. And then I noticed that when I want my son to switch, he throws a fit. And his therapist who specializes in transitions for people with Aspergers Syndrome says that he needs something to occupy himself physically in order to have a calm transition. So he has a ball to bounce from math to reading, a quarter to flip in his palm on the way to gym, and gum to chew as he gets ready to leave school.

So it hit me: eating between tasks is a coping skill because my body wants to be doing something to calm myself down. And the therapist says this makes sense. In the neuro-typical population (the nice-nice word for not-special-ed) people bite their nails, eat Ho-Hos, twirl their hair… there are tons of transitional tools people develop to help themselves along.

The problem is that if you get fat, or nails get bloody, or you start not being able to get out of your transition (my problem) then you are stuck. And stuck is bad. I'm stuck eating to procrastinate changing tasks because changing is hard and eating makes it easier.

To be honest, this is not helping much, because I'm at the end of the post, and I will want a bagel any moment. But I understand what is driving me to want a bagel during transitions: It's a discomfort being between things. I could tell myself: only one bagel, only one bagel. I have tried that for thirty years, though. And it's not working. And it's not because I don't try. It's not working because it's impossible. So instead I need to minimize transitions.

I learned this from my son, by the way. The therapist tells me to give him warning when a transition is coming and to tell him what we're doing next. When I do that, he's much calmer. So I am doing that with myself right now. I am going to type this last line, and then go to bed. I'm visualizing my transition: No meandering through the kitchen. Walk straight upstairs.

And then I'll have a new problem: That I do not take time to plan each transition before I make it…

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