Welcome, San Francisco Chronicle readers

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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:

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

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There’s no magic pill for being lost.

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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 was that her fiancé 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: Read more

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Asperger’s at work: Why I need a sick day to register my car

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The guy who sold me my car cancelled the plates the very next week. Luckily, I didn’t know that because there was a November expiration sticker on the plate. So the fact that I was driving the car illegally for three months did not bother me. Until now. But now I’m at the DMV.

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. Read more

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Don’t be a snob about career advice

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I have found that the best way to manage myself is by asking for a lot of help. The question is, how do you know who to take advice from?

The answer is not always intuitive. For example, you’d think that if Bill Gates wants to give you career advice, you should take it, right? I mean, the guy's had a pretty decent career. The problem is that if he doesn't care about your career, he's going to give you generic advice.

Here are five other counter-intuitive principles I have used to figure out who to listen to when it comes to my own career:

Listen to people who hate you. People ask me all the time how I put up with the level of criticism this blog draws. The interesting thing about taking advice from people who don’t like me is that sometimes, they’ll say things that other people wouldn’t say because it would hurt me. I rely on my gut in terms of whose criticism comes from caring and understanding and whose criticism comes from an obsessive need to take me down, but after I figure that out, I still pay attention to my critics. Read more

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How to make business travel manageable

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Last year I traveled almost every week. Some weeks I traveled to three different cities.

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. Read more

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Why men should give women flowers

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Here’s the deal with giving flowers. Women like receiving flowers. Men think flowers are stupid.

Men think: Flowers die, they don’t do anything when they are alive, they are expensive, and they are a cliche. Men know that women in general like flowers, but men also believe that women they know personally do not like flowers. The women they know are the exception to the rule.

I think it’€™s safe to say that mostly women are reading this post. Women are reading to figure out how to get the men in their lives to send flowers.

Here’€™s what it’€™s going to take: Bottom line impact. Yes, the guys want to get laid, but dinner seems better: it’s like money well spent to them — you still get the sex, but you also get good food. What do you get with flowers? This is how men think, for the most part.

So, here’€™s what you get: Read more

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This week’s series: How to deal with Asperger Syndrome at work

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People often tell me that I should write career advice for people with Asperger Syndrome. This is because I am surrounded by people who have Asperger's, and I have it myself. Please, do not tell me I don't have it. First of all, it looks very different in men and women, and most of you have experience with men. Second, I'm way more weird in person than I am on the blog. And surely you thought it was the other way around.

So, anyway, the reason I'm good at giving career advice is because I had to learn things systematically, which helps me break it down for everyone else.

For example, I had to learn that a candy dish on someone's desk means “I like to talk with people.” Other people read this cue instinctively. It makes for a good blog post but an annoying co-worker if I don't teach myself stuff quickly.

I don't really do career coaching. I don't have patience. But often career coaches send people with Asperger's to me, because mostly, these people are extremely difficult to coach.

They are difficult to coach because the biggest problem is that non-verbal cues that are obvious to everyone else are totally lost on people with Asperger's. For example, you can tell when you are boring someone, but someone with Asperger's cannot—we just keep talking. Read more

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All career issues are religious issues. Maybe.

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I starting to think that the most effective preparation for a good career is religion.

I am writing this post on the eve of Yom Kippur. I am constantly trying to figure out how religion fits in my life. Sometimes I think it doesn't fit. I mean, I'm a Jew dating a pig farmer. And I can't figure out what to do with my kids on Yom Kippur, so I'm sending them to school. I never, once in eighteen years, went to school on Yom Kippur. So I know it's going to feel crappy. I hope my family is not reading this.

Well, of course they are not, because they are in synagogue today.

I wish I could make my religion problems go away. I wish I could not care about religion because I'm an intellectual. Or I wish I could not care about religion because I am fine doing it however I do it.

One thing that nags at me is that I know for sure is that religion is great preparation for being able to get what you want out of your work life. And, if you read this blog regularly, you know that I think the purpose of work is to get you what you want out of your whole life, not just the work part. Read more

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Knowing a problem is harder than solving it

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Self-knowledge can solve all your problems. Because it’s more difficult to understand what your problem is than to know how to solve it.

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. Read more

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Lessons in self-confidence (from Amanda Blank)

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What I’m listening to right now: Amanda Blank. Here’s a song to play when you’re not at work.

Amanda is a white-girl rapper, darling of the hipsters, and hot-girl candy for the intelligentsia. Right up my alley, right? My favorite line so far is “My rhymes are painful and fresh/My p*ssy’s tastin’ the best.”

Today, Ryan Healy and I were in D.C. for a marathon strategy meeting with a board member. The second half of the meeting was about marketing strategy. The first half of the meeting was about finding a strategy for ending how Ryan and I are at each others’ throats over subjects that having nothing to do with the company.

When the board member left the room for a minute, we had this conversation:

Me: It’s so awkward to be left in here with just you.

Ryan: It’s not awkward. The meeting is going well.

Me: Right. It could be more awkward. Like when it was us not talking in the airport.

Ryan: At least we weren’t sitting together on the plane.

Me: Yeah. I know. I changed my seat so we didn’t sit together.

Ryan: Really? So did I. Read more

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