I am not a big believer in the dream job. For one thing, I don’t think people know their dream job. Because it’s a job description that has to cover eight hours a day of work. It’s hard to imagine something you’d love to do eight hours a day, much less fit into in a nice, neat job description.
And then there’s the be-careful-what-you-wish-for syndrome. Because it’s hard to know what you’d like to do for eight hours a day til you try it.
I used to think I wanted to be a sex writer. My master’s thesis from graduate school was about my sex life. But when I tried to support myself writing about sex, when I started pitching stories to Cosmo, I found that no one wanted to hire me; magazines hire people to write about officially important sex research. I wanted to write about me.
So I looked for that magic intersection of things I’m good at and things I like to do and things people will pay me for. And I ended up being a career writer. Fortunately, though, I was able to be a career writer writing about me.
Which is probably what I wanted to do all along. So this is a great argument for the advice I give all the time which is to shut up about not having your dream job and just take any job so you can learn about what people will pay you to do that you might like to do.
Still, I am very excited to tell you that finally, someone offered to pay me to write about my sex life. I had a great time, but surprise, I discovered that I couldn’t resist slipping in some career advice anyway. So I guess I have my dream job, right here. If there were such thing as a dream job.
Anyway, here’s the piece I wrote, for The Daily Beast.
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
Today is the first hay baling day of the summer. The farmer is used to making huge, round bales, with big, loud machines. This time, though, he did smaller, square bales, and he found a way to include our son. And the dog.
I spend part of each day counseling people who don’t know how to find work that is satisfying. It’s one of the hardest things to learn to do. Here is how to do it well, at any age:
1. Get yourself accustomed to trying new things.
To find work you love, you have to try working at lots of different jobs, maybe 50, maybe 100. You are limited only by the ideas you have for what to try.
To instill this spirit for experimentation in my son, I have helped him do things like sell rhubarb at a farmer’s market, decorate containers to market eggs, and raise animals to sell. Read more
Cullen left. It’s unclear if he has dumped Melissa. I think he has. (If you missed earlier installments on this story, here’s where I find Cullen in Melissa’s bed.)
This photo is from when Cullen was excited to be in lots of photos on my blog.
It was the day that a TV writer emailed me about adapting my blog for the big screen. Or semi-big screen. Or whatever we are calling TV now, but I have to say, as an aside, that TV is the new hipster medium because episodes allow for more character development than a single movie. I heard this from the Farmer, and he’s not a guy who could make this stuff up. And we are watching Breaking Bad and I want to be absurd and funny like those writers.
This is what happened with Cullen. He agreed to redesign my blog in exchange for free room and board. And then he realized he didn’t have time to do that, because he has a full time job.
Meanwhile, we were having big Facebook drama on the farm because Melissa does not feel like she has a boyfriend unless the guy puts in on his Facebook status. So Cullen did that. Read more
Welcome to the world-famous board meeting for Brazen Careerist.
For those of you who have not been to a board meeting since I had a miscarriage in the board meeting, let me tell you, this one will not be so interesting. At least at a biological level.
What's interesting, maybe, is that there is always tension in the board meeting because who knows what I'll do next?
But I am trying to be on good behavior. I am trying to be a more reliable person. Not so much of a wild card. I just read this study that the five most career-limiting habits of smart people are:
1. Unreliable
2. “It’s not my job”
3. Procrastination
4. Resistance to change
5. Negative attitude
I think we each must know what ours is, because I knew right away that mine is unreliability. I have been sort of telling myself that I am so clever, bright, and witty that unreliable doesn't matter. But it does. I feel bad that so many people are reliably there for me and I'm a wild card. So I decide I'm starting to be reliable today. I am going to be dependable and well behaved in the meeting.
I can't sit still. Some people have to rock back and forth or use a squeeze thing. I have to think about something else and write it.
We review how our ideas at Brazen Careerist were too early and now the world is catching up. I think about how I am too far ahead about goats. Goat will be the new beef. Forget cheese. The melting pot of America will be filled with goat meat. Read more
First of all, here is a photo of rhubarb cobbler.
And this is my food blog post for all of yeterday’s commenters who think I would not be a good food blogger. You will love this post: it's about what to do if you think you're about to be fired.
1. Be really interesting. And fun. It's a lethal combination.
This photo looks disgusting, because that is the truth about food. Most of it looks disgusting. Even stuff that tastes good looks disgusting in a photo. It's like sex. If you have a cinematographer and three lighting guys and a foley artist who comes in at the end, then the sex looks great. But if you take a picture of yourself having sex, forget it. You look like gross, retarded animals.
So even good food looks disgusting. But this photo is not actually an example of that, because this rhubarb cobbler tasted disgusting as well. Too much flour, I think. Although Melissa kept saying it had too much butter. Maybe too much flour and butter and it needed more rhubarb. Read more
When we are not in the garden, I obsess about how I want to redesign my blog to look like the Pioneer Woman’s blog. I want to be the Pioneer Woman on Suicide Watch. That will be the new title of my blog. I am obsessed with stealing her blog design.
Melissa sits in my garden with me and talks. She likes to talk to me in my garden because she says it’s the only time I don’t interrupt her.
In the garden Melissa narrates her Facebook activity like it’s a horse race. And she takes pictures of the farm all day long and posts them to Facebook.
Her Facebook friends tell her she is really lucky to be living on a farm. An old friend of hers that is really not her friend but her ex-boyfriend’s friend, says, “You’re so lucky. I wish I were on a farm right now.”
Melissa tells me he is a designer who can write code and he wants to live on the farm.
“Invite him,” I say.
She tells him, “You can come live here. Penelope needs a designer. Can you redesign her blog?”
He says yes. Melissa gives him one of the ten thousand free tickets she has from living in Hong Kong and Milan with jet-set millionaires who foot the bill for everything. Read more
I can’t help being giddy that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the (now former) managing director of the IMF, was whisked off his plane at JFK and delivered to one of the most notorious criminal holding arenas in the world, Riker’s Island. It’s a great story about sexual harassment because it’s so hard to nail someone like this. And it was done so well.
Strauss-Kahn is accused of raping a maid at his hotel. Which is sad. But there are some notable things about the case: First, he forced her to give him a blow job, and now it seems that there is widespread recognition that a forced blow job is rape. This is a big deal in legal history. For a long time, blow jobs didn’t count.
Another notable thing is that a woman who is a maid took legal action against a man who was staying in a hotel room that costs $3000 a night.
Typically, men harass women who they felt were beneath them. For most of history, this has meant all women – as all women had little power. In the last few decades, though, women have gained more power, and men have paid heed to that in their harassment targets. Read more
Our neighbor, Kathy, called to tell us to come over for prom pictures.
We had no idea what she was talking about. I told Melissa I was too happy reading Little Bee in the sun. “But,” I said, “Kathy is so nice to us. One of us has to go. We have to be good neighbors.”
Melissa said, “Then you go.”
“Let’s do rock scissors paper.”
“No. You want to be a good neighbor, you go. And the lambs are so happy sitting in my lap. I don’t want to move them.”
“Take the lambs with you. They’ll like that.”
“In the car?”
“Yeah. Like dogs.”
Melissa goes. It seems like maybe this would be okay because when my sons walk over to Kathy’s house, the goats follow my sons, and Kathy invites the boys in for chocolate milk and anything else they find in her fridge, and the goats wait outside, like watch dogs who have a big appetite for grass.
We thought the lambs would do that. Maybe. Or wait in the car. I don’t know what we thought. But Melissa was back in five minutes.
“You have to come. You’re not going to believe it. The whole school is there. At Kathy’s.”
“Did you see Zach and Mitch?”
“Yeah. But you have to come.”
We pull up to the house, with the lambs in the car, and there is the senior class, in prom outfits, lining up for photos. We get out of the car and start searching for Zach and Mitch. The lambs follow us.
Mitch and Zach look so cute in their tuxes that match their dates’ dresses. We want to talk with them but the lambs start making noises because they are not close enough to Melissa, and they won’t shut up, and we really just need to get the lambs back into the car.
Days later, when we ask Mitch how was prom, he says, “People thought you guys were nuts wearing those hats.”
“What about the lambs?”
“The hats were more crazy.” Read more
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Since Melissa is living on the farm full time, she has farm jobs. Her job is to get my younger son to take care of his lambs. Technically raising and selling two lambs is his business. He wanted to earn money like his brother, and his eggs selling is no longer high enough stakes for him.
But if the lambs are a small business, Melissa is a co-founder.
Imagine my five-year-old with his two front teeth missing and his blond curls still flat from the last night’s bath.
Imagine Melissa sitting next to him. Each with dark black lamb in their lap, each lamb the size of a kitten and each is drinking out of a bottle.
Cute, right?
But here’s what it is, really. My son is swinging a bat, threatening every living thing with accidental decapitation as he walks sort of to the lamb house and sort of not, as I shout, “Get your butt to those lambs!” Read more