I told Melissa that black and white photos look stupid on my blog.
Did you know Melissa edits my photos? It started out that she lived with me, and she took all the photos. Her photos are gorgeous. When she moved out of my house I knew I couldn’t take pictures as well as she did, so I asked James Maher to take photos. He brought a gritty street photographer’s eye to the blog. Read more
This post takes place in Beverly Hills. I’m just going to tell you right now that I go there to get Botox. If anyone is surprised, I’ll be surprised. The path to self-acceptance is paved with injectables.
Step 1: Try to change yourself.
I was going to write a big post about how I’m confessing to getting Botox and then I thought better of it, that it would make me look too old. Then I thought maybe it’ll make me look rich. Because honestly, Botox is really expensive and it’s not just Botox but also fillers. I don’t even know what the brand is. I just go to the dermatologist and say “make me look younger.” Read more
When I was trying to get on the national volleyball tour, that was the only thing I was focused on. So eventually, I played professional beach volleyball. When I was trying to get my memoir published, I was focused on that more than anything else, and eventually, University of Colorado Press came through. And when I was running my last startup, I was always focused on funding. That’s why my company never failed. Read more
About a month ago I got a stack of catalogues from Restoration Hardware in the mail. My first thought was that I had purchased so much at Restoration Hardware in the past year that I am now one of their top customers. I thought about my friend Maria, who teaches people how to choose a color for anything in their home. She can make you feel like a genius and I’m pretty sure that means everything she buys from Restoration Hardware tax deductible. Read more
Black people should not wear hoodies.
That’s one way to deal with the problem of people shooting black people. Maybe not the best. Who even knows. I have a friend who is white, married to a black guy and they have two sons, who, as you can guess, count as black in this country. Even she has no idea how to teach black boys to avoid getting shot.
This makes sense. But I am mystified when I see that the Global Summit for Women this year was all men. That’s the picture, up there. Read more
The secret to the success of this blog is that instead of showing you how perfect my life is, I show myself drinking in the morning, before work.
My husband is always worrying that I make us look bad, so he makes up rules like how I can’t write about our sex life, and then I violate the rules while pretending to follow them. Like, I write about our not-having-sex life. For example, it’s asparagus season so there is no oral sex because asparagus doesn’t change the smell of just your pee. Read more
After about a decade of doing research on happiness, I realize that my favorite research comes from university labs that use self-reported data. Most of our happiness lab research is based on self-reported data about who feels happy.
Which means, maybe, that I am my own lab. I can self-report just as well as anyone else. So here is my self-reported research. And, like all good university lab results, there is a little third-party oversight at the end. Read more
I lived in New York City for ten years. I had a 500 square foot rent-stablized apartment in Park Slope. Every week I lived there someone asked me to tell them if I’m planning to move.
To squeeze into 500 square feet with my husband, we put our winter clothes in storage. Then our books. When our son was born, all our belongings went into storage to make room for his. And when we had a second kid, we got rid of the beds. The kids slept on a counter that turned into a bed and a dining room table that turned into a bed. Read more
This is a guest post by Cassie Boorn. She works with me at Quistic, and she blogs at cassieboorn.com.
We are packing up our trunk outside of a friend’s house when he approaches the car.
It was late at night. We’d spent all day at a funeral. We were so distracted that we didn’t even see him walking towards us.
We think it is a joke.
We are in a nice quiet neighborhood. This guy couldn’t possibly be mugging us right now.
He tells us to get in the car.
We see the gun.
Everyone is silent. Read more
I intuitively knew to hide my kids when I started having them, because I had already had a rip-roaring career where I steered clear of women who doted on their kids. (It’s always women, even today.) The kids were annoying to me. I couldn’t understand why the women would lose focus on their jobs to get stupid about their kids.
I made sure to stay in male-dominated departments so as to not get sucked into the kid thing by proximity.
I made sure to take no maternity leave. (A terrible decision, but one that many women make.)
Even with all my precautions, my editor suggested that instead of writing a workplace column I should write a women’s column.
That suggestion pissed me off — but I just vowed to hide my kids more.