Brazen Careerist Party in Washington, DC. Thursday, Nov. 11, 7pm at Lounge 201. You're invited.
I always had this huge fantasy about how Brazen Careerist would sell for ten million bazillion dollars, and I would use the money to fly everyone I know to a huge party at some fun destination.
This is not that party.  But we [...]

Book snobbery takes many forms in my life. For example, when I worked in bookstores, thinking my life was over because all my friends were lawyers, I spent a lot of time mumbling “Philistines!” as I reshelved A Hundred Years of Solitude under G instead of M.
But the truth is that if you reshelve a [...]

I’m deciding if I should take a sleeping pill.
I know tons of people who take them. I never understood the need, to be honest. I remember when I was in a mental ward. My group therapy was a bunch of eating disorder girls (which I was part of, but a little old for) and a [...]

It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up. It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details.
We can never achieve perfection — any of us. Yet so [...]

Recently, I covered my hallway in wallpaper I bought online (via Wallpaper Weekly). Everyone I showed the wallpaper to said the it would be too busy a pattern. But I loved it. So I bought it anyway.

There are a lot of problems with my hallway now — most notably, I used Elmer's glue instead of [...]

Remember the donkey in the last post? Well, here’s the story of the donkey. The farmer bought it, but he doesn’t know very much about donkeys, except “Horses need to be ridden,” he said. About ten thousand times.
The donkey is not trained. And we don’t have any riding gear for the donkey, so I rode [...]

We drove to Iowa City yesterday, to have Rosh Hashanah with my family. I took the kids out of school and told their teachers it’s the Jewish New Year so the kids will miss school. I said it in front of the kids so I can teach them that we take off a day for [...]

When I first met the farmer, I knew he was not a normal farmer because normal farmers don’t email bloggers for a date. But also, he gave himself away because he quoted Garrison Keillor to me. Then, when I thought I could not put up with him dumping me anymore, and this time would be [...]

In a recent interview with Fast Company, Ashton Kutcher – the celebrity-turned-Internet-mogel - said that privacy is more valuable than celebrity. This makes sense to me.
On the Internet everyone is a celebrity. I think Rebecca Blood was the first person to introduce this concept to me when she said  Generation Y manages itself like celebrities online, [...]

I am in NYC with no money. This used to happen all the time. When my company was running out of money, I would go to San Diego to give a speech and stay at a four-star hotel and not have a cent. And no credit card, of course. I would fly first class, stash [...]

The vast majority of electronic communication today is via social media, according to Paul Greenberg, a relationship management consultant. At first I didn’t believe it. But then I thought about the viral nature of communication via social networks, and the statistic started to make sense.
So, I have been thinking for a while that I need to [...]

When the kids and I arrived at the farm the day of the wedding, I got out of the car and the farmer said, "You're wearing black?"

My son went to the hen house to collect eggs. The farm cats love eating raw eggs, but on a farm, you only feed the cats scraps. My son [...]

I am switching up the blog a bit. It's time to take the Brazen Careerist part off of my blog. It's time for the blog to just be Penelope Trunk, and only my company should use the name Brazen Careerist.
We have been saying this in Brazen Careerist board meetings for about five months. The conversation goes [...]

Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin, has arrived. I read it on the farmer’s sofa.
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, [...]

It’s unbelievable to me that everyone continues to watch football when we know that men are getting genuinely, permanently, brain damaged. The game is tantamount to cockfighting, only with people instead of animals.
The NFL has finally admitted the problem, to the extent it is poised to be the largest funding source for research about trauma [...]

People at work are asking me why I am not working as many hours as I used to. I am. But I am working on anger management. Here are seven tips I've tried using:
1. Face the problem and make it a priority.
I used to think anger management problem is a thing for men who are [...]

I’m pretty sure that the people who pay attention to happiness research are actually happier people. And happiness begets happiness. So I have a feeling that me just writing a post about happiness, and you reading it makes us all happier.
Here is why I think that:
Recently, Gretchen Rubin sent me her new book, The Happiness Project: [...]

I don’t usually write about my life in real time, because the difference between a blog post than reads like a diary entry and a blog post that someone would want to read is usually just time passing.
So time passing means that even though I get a ton of comments, I do not usually run [...]

It looks like a lot of people are coming here from the article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Big City Blues, Could a more affordable life, away from the Bay Area, actually be better, by Rob Baedeker.
Here are some of my most popular posts about figuring out where to live:

I'm moving out of New York City
How [...]

When I was in the mental ward, it was mostly girls in their teens with messed up track records and eating disorders. But my roommate was from Kellogg, a top-ten business school.
I thought it was insane that she was there. She was so smart. She was going to be great at work. Her only problem [...]