My accidental vacation

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I have never been a fan of vacations. Why would I need a vacation from my life if I like my life?

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. Read more

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How to spot a cheater

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You are probably wondering if I think about Melissa having an affair with the Farmer.

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.” Read more

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Work is a safe haven

Our cat has been peeing on everything. He especially likes the our bed sheets and my younger son's shirts.

Finally we took the cat to the vet and it turns out he had crystals in his bladder. I'm not going into the chemistry lesson of acid and base and crystals. Mostly because I couldn't follow the vet's explanation, but the bottom line was that we had to do medicine for three days and then special food.

For a while, the cat was well enough to follow Melissa around the house and cuddle in between the curl of her legs whenever she lay down.

The problem is we feed twenty barn cats. And two house cats. Three house cats if you count the outside cat that we can't keep outside. And four if you count the dog, who wont' stop eating the cat food. Read more

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5 Shortcuts to make yourself more valuable

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You hear all this talk aobut how you have to march to your own drummer, think out of the box, blah blah. The truth is, you can't change anything until you know all the rules.

Advice admonishing you to break rules is so shallow. How can you break rules without learning them first? People who understand all the rules know intuitively how to break them because they know the rules that really are not working. People who do not know rules are not breaking rules. They are annoying people.

Because for the most part, rules are there to make peoples' lives easier. There are lots of us in society, in the workplace, driving through intersections. If we don't have rules there is chaos. Some rules need changing, but you can't tell that until you know the rules and how they work together.

So instead of giving you advice on how to break the rules, I'm going to give you advice on how to learn them fast.

1. Learn multiple sets of rules at the same time.

The more types of rules you learn, the faster you get at learning them. This is, basically, what a liberal arts education is — learning systems in disparate categories.

I'm fascinated by the yarn bombers. Here's a photo of some of their work:

 
What makes the yarn bombers so fascinating to me is the practitioners have learned two sets of rules that don't usually go together: How to do yarn work at a high enough level to do it on the street, fast and furtively. And how to create street art in a way that has social impact, defies arrest, and leverages networking tools to pass along knowledge. Read more

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Social skills boot camp

My friend Melissa is here for two weeks. She is one of those Gen-Y jet-set types. But she flew here, to Wisconsin, from Hong Kong, where she just quit her job in finance to become a nanny in Italy.

I was going to tell you that I love her because she is taking amazing photos with her zillion-dollar camera of stuff on the farm that I can see but I can’t figure out how to get in a photo. Like this. It’s just my house. But it’s the magic of my house in the winter.

What I really want to tell you about Melissa though, is that she quit her $150,000/year in international finance to hang out with some nine-year-old Italian after school. She speaks Chinese, which is how she got the family to pay her enough money. The family really wanted a nanny who could fix the kid’s English accent because English tutor was from Sweden. But now they’re getting a two-for-one: Their kid will learn English with an American accent and Chinese with an American accent, too.

Like me, Melissa has Asperger’s Syndrome. So I can finish her sentences for her, and she can finish my sentences. Which is funny because neither of us ever shuts up. So there are really never any sentences to finish.

We are both very high-functioning for people with Asperger’s. Both of us were in special ed classes in high school. And both of us were in honors classes as well. We spend a lot of time helping each other deal with Asperger’s. Here are things we do. Read more

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The coming decade will be about trust

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I think the next decade will be about trust. This is the only decade in history that will be formed wholly by Gen X—we are so small that our age of power is brief. But research from sources like Tammy’s Erikson’s book, What’s Next Gen X?, shows that the most pronounced traits of Gen X are no patience for veneers, hierarchy, and BS-laden idealism. Gen X will oversee a decade of trust.

A survey from Deloitte ushers in this decade of trust. Deloitte reports that most people who are job hunting are doing it because they don’t trust their employer. And most Human Resources executives think the number-one factor in turnover right now is transparency—less transparency means more turnover.

When it comes to transparency, corporations are ahead of individuals, but only by necessity. Soon, though, people who are not transparent will not make it in the workforce. Here are ways to think about transparency to make your own career path one of transparency and trust: Read more

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Is it OK to be different at work than you are at home?

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A couple of days ago, Louise Fletcher, a professional resume writer, blogged about my ability to say whatever I want and not kill my career. That same day, Kathy Williams wrote this comment on my blog:

My son introduced me to your blog which I appreciate. I am your polar opposite. You have complete freedom to say whatever you want … for whatever reason is not important. We can all use a little more honesty.

In general, I think people can say much more than they think they can. It used to be that no one blogged about unemployment, bad bosses or screaming at their kids. Now these are all pretty common posts. This should tell you that topics that you think will change what people think about you don’t actually do that. Consider what you’re doing — if it’s within the realm of normal, people don’t care that you’re doing it—it’s not interesting.

Of course, things that I think are totally normal, like, having a miscarriage at work, turn out to be very controversial. But really, I am still not sure why. I mean, just thinking logically, hundreds of thousands of women have miscarriages every year, and most of those women have not had a kid so they are working, so hundreds of thousands of women each year have a miscarriage at work.

I think my inability to understand why this is controversial might be a blessing. Read more

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How to think out of the box

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The reason telling someone to “think out of the box” is so stupid is because it really means “I hate all your ideas” or “I can't think out of the box myself, so I need you to.” In any case, it's lame to say.

But I read research from the University of Toronto and Harvard that people who are the really creative people, the ones who can think out of the box, usually have some sort of mental illness in their family history. So now I can stop feeling like I'm a big braggart when I say that I'm very creative. It's my payoff for a family full of mental problems.

But also, I think there are degrees of creativity, and knowing where you fall is really important, because then you know more about what you need to feel fulfilled.

We are all creative. The only thing we really have in this world is the ability to craft a life. One day your life will be over, and we are largely unsure what happens next, but during the time we're alive, we get to choose what we do. We create a life.

So I get annoyed when people talk like some people are creative and some aren't. It reminds me of poor white people who insult black people because they feel like they are too poor to pick on white people. If you feel bad about yourself, you pick on other people just to make yourself feel better. Read more

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Achilles heel of minimalism: It’s boring

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We took a trip to NYC because I was worried that we are were not being exposed to enough visually stimulating inputs. I want the kids to see new things, do new things, and I wanted to see the Barney’s Christmas windows. The theme was foodies. I was stressed that I was not up on Food Network enough to get the high-brow insider references. Still, the windows were gorgeous.

I was talking with Leo Babauta about minimalism. Well, actually, we were talking about his new book, and his minimalist process of promoting it, which I will now contribute to with this link. Read more

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How to bounce back (again and again)

I smashed a lamp over my head. There was blood everywhere. And glass. And I took a picture.

I think my life is getting better because it used to be that I wrote everything. In order to cope. Now I can take pictures. So I have two coping mechanisms.

The best way to judge someone is not by setbacks, but by bounce-backs. I am good at judging people this way. I think this is because I’m good at bouncing back. From stuff people think no one can bounce from. I can still bounce. Here’s how: Read more

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