Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach, detail
I’m meditating now because it slows down time and I only have 14 more weeks until both my kids are at college. When Z is reading on the couch, and Nino is reading next to him, I pull up a chair and meditate with my eyes open because I don’t want to miss this moment. Read more
I treat my freezer like a savings account. As a single parent with an unstable income, I know that when there’s an emergency I’ll use rent money, camp money, or even food money to solve the problem. But no matter what the emergency is, I can’t pay for it with frozen broccoli, so with food in the freezer, we’ll always be able to eat. Read more
I decided that as a responsible parent I should wait to get a new dog until my oldest son leaves for college. It’s his last summer at home. We don’t need more tumult.
I waited until after college applications were done on January 15 and then I answered an ad on Craigslist for a puppy they had to give up because they were allergic. They wanted $400 ahead of time then they’d bring me the puppy.
Okay. Fine. So Craigslist wasn’t a good idea. Then I found a site that matches dogs with new owners and I got matched with a dog that was coming from Russia but would be in Maine, and I wondered, what did I say in my profile that made people think I’m an idiot? Read more
Recently someone in my writing class hired a lawyer to tell me she wants a refund for the class. The lawyer sent an email to me requesting $25,000 in damages for his client. I sent this email in response:
Dear Sir.
I don’t give refunds for the class. I do not say anywhere that I give refunds.
It’s not against the law for me to have a student who didn’t like the class. This is a 12-month class. There is no law that says Lucy has to receive everything in the first two months. I have not broken any laws.
There are 85 people in the course and Lucy is the only person complaining. I wonder why that is? Do you have any ideas? Read more
I told this guy, Brendan, that I would write about his baby bottles on my blog. Well, first I told him he had to pay me. Then he sent the bottles to me, and I liked them, so writing about them on the blog didn’t seem like it would be that difficult. Also, Brendan has been reading my blog for a long time. It felt good to tell him yes. Read more
Negotiating is not a work skill—it’s a life skill. File it in the have-good-social-skills category, not with make-more-money.
People with good social skills do much better in the world than people with high IQs by all measures except for winning the Nobel prize for economics. So then it should make sense to you that you should think about negotiating tactics all the time. Read more
In a survey of graduating professional students, Linda Babcock, of Carnegie Mellon University, found that only seven per cent of women attempted to negotiate their initial offers, while fifty-seven per cent of the men did so. After years of analysis, she concludes that women might, in fact, be better off not negotiating.
Babcock is not the only person to draw this conclusion. Here’s why: Read more
Melissa is driving through Darlington trying to avoid the police. If they see me they'll arrest me, and we know they know my car. I put the front seat back all the way so I'm out of view. I keep my seatbelt on because in case they see us, I don't want to be breaking any extra laws.
I have to start this story when I was getting a divorce. People told me the cleanest, easiest divorces are when there are two good lawyers. So I asked around for the two best lawyers in Madison. They knew each other, of course. And negotiations went smoothly, except for my lawyer quitting first when I started blogging about the divorce and then when I agreed to talk about the divorce with the New York Times.
The police are not actually chasing us. But we feel like we're on the run. I told my lawyer — not my divorce lawyer but my new lawyer, who deals with about-to-be-arrested types — that the police have been to my house three times to arrest me. The Farmer is so stressed he's not even coming back from the hayfield for lunch. The lawyer says, “You'll have to stay away from the house til I can get the papers signed by a judge.”
I was thinking of staying at Jeanenne's house for a few days but I feel bad asking her to harbor a fugitive. So Melissa and I are on our way to Madison.
As we pass the turnoff for our house I worry that we don't have our computers. Read more
Coats are very important on the farm. Mine are always not dry enough, not warm enough, or not dirty enough for going into the chicken house. So when I'm on the farm I just wear one of the farmer's coats.
1. Clarify personal needs that are threatened by the conflict.
And hats. Do you see the red hat in the picture? It's from Amsoil Lubricants. When I first met the farmer I thought it was hilarious to have a hat that said lubricants. So the first time he dumped me I tried to get the lubricants hat as a relationship souvenir.
Later I realized that he would dump me a lot. It was his way of coping with the feeling that intimacy is scary. So then I focused more on learning conflict resolution and less on who gets the hat.
2. Accept conflict as a natural part of personal progress.
In fact, most of life is about conflict resolution. It's either internal conflict or external conflict, but if you don't have conflict then you are probably not trying to do something interesting with your life. (Not that interesting is everyone's goal, of course.)
Michael Stainer, who writes The Great Work Blog, once told me that if you are not annoying someone you are not doing anything new. I think this is true. (Sometimes I think it could all come down to this: you either scare your mom by creating an unstable life or you scare yourself that you are living merely the life your mom wants for you instead of the life you want for yourself.) Read more
I am back with the farmer.
This probably is not surprising to you, because admittedly, it is absurd to be engaged one day and not engaged the next day. But there are exacerbating factors, and basically, the way I got him back was to be more likable.
I have spent most of my career overcoming my lack of social skills by studying research about what makes people likable. And I think the research I’ve applied so systematically in my career is finally helping me in my personal life.
Here’s what we know about being likable:
1. Don’t give ultimatums. It’s disrespectful. Instead, be a negotiator.
The farmer does not want to be in this blog. As you might imagine, we have this discussion a lot.
First it was like this:
Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.
Me: You have to be. I can’t live without writing my life.
Then the conversation was like this:
Him: I don’t want to be in the blog.
Me: How about if you can edit whatever you want? Read more