Here's a list of the posts that got the most comments this year. Interestingly, the post that got the most traffic is did not make the list. That post is: What it's like to have sex with someone who has Asperger's.

Thank you for a fun year. I feel so grateful to have my blog. Being able to write for this community and read the consistently insightful comments has made the year so much better.

Jan. How to make yourself more likable (208 comments)

Jan. 8 Tips for anger management (234 comments)

Jan. Do you overemphasize happiness? (249 comments)

Jan. Racism is alive and kicking. Hello, McDonald's. (415 comments)

Jan. How to manage a college education (185 comments)

Jan. Being an expert takes time, not talent (183 comments)

Feb. Test: Is your life happy or interesting? (246 comments)

Mar. List of things I hate (183 comments)

Apr. Turning point (294 comments)

Aug. When you're feeling lost, don't hide (162 comments)

Nov. Veterans Day should be cancelled (335 comments)

Nov. 5 Reasons to stop trying to be happy (152 comments)

The most common criticism of my blog (which has 60,000 subscribers) is that I write controversial headlines just to get traffic. I usually ignore this criticism because it’s so ignorant. But today I’m going to tell you why writing controversial headlines just to be controversial is totally stupid.

There is no formula for a wildly popular post.

Look, if I knew how to write a controversial headline that would get a ton of traffic then I’d be writing them every day. But really I’d be retired, living in Bermuda, not even writing headlines.

The most successful posts are posts that people email to their friends. Every day, whatever number of subscribers a blog has, that’s how many people read the blog post. The only way you get more readers is if people start telling their friends about the post. (more…)

It’s true that I am publishing my gift suggestions too late for the biggest gift-giving season of the year. But I think it’s okay, because the gifts are totally impractical.

In fact, I think this is actually my wish list—stuff I wish I had been given over the years to keep my career on track.

1. A hall monitor for emails.

Email provides a chance to sidestep the problems of reading facial cues, which is what people with Asperger’s want. And email provides a chance for introverts to collect their thoughts before they talk to extroverts, which is what introverts want.

The problem with email is that the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says that emails are misinterpreted fifty percent of the time. (more…)

My new thing is self-discipline.  I am going to get better at it.  I am nervous writing this, because I don’t want to fail.

So this is the first thing I know: If you are really serious about doing something, it’s painful to tell people, because fear of failure is so high. Once you decide that you really want something enough to shift your life to get it – at that point you want it so much that you will feel like your life is somehow incomplete if you don’t get it. So it is scary just to talk about it.

This is how I’m feeling about sugar and bread. I think it only leads to bad things. I think it makes me crazy and I have googled a thousand different sites about addiction to sugar and bread, and I think it’s true. Here’s what I think: (more…)

It’s the time of year when there are a bazillion articles about what gift you should give your boss. The implication is that of course you’ll give a gift. But I think you’re better off skipping it. Here’s why:

1. Gift recommendations are not really recommendations.
When a journalist or blogger (is there a difference?) writes about gift items, they get to review the gift items. Which means each gift was already a gift to the writer. I know about this because I’m terrible at it. For example, I would like Bose noise canceling headphones. They are too extravagant for me to buy for myself, so I should ask Bose for a trial pair and then tell you to buy them for your boss.

2. Christmas at work is bad for your boss. Really.
First of all, it’s bad for your company to have everyone give end-of-the-year gifts, or holiday gifts, or whatever companies are calling Christmas gifts lately. It’s bad because Christmas in the office is bad for diversity. I write about this every year, and every year it is the most controversial post. So you don’t need to write to me about how I am a Grinch and a cultural moron and Jews should move back to Israel, okay? Because I get those comments—about 300 of them—each year. So all I’m going to tell you now is that you are not helping your boss reach his or her performance goals for your team by undermining diversity by celebrating Christmas at work. (more…)

The farmer bought me a camera. It's a big deal for us because the farmer agreed to date me only if his photo would never show up on my blog. It means a lot to me that he's buying me a camera which, invariably, will mean more photos of him on the blog.

But also, owning a camera allows me to make photos a big part of my blog; until now, I have only published photos here that other people took. I am excited to see where this leads, but first, I am excited to get better at taking photos. So if there is a blog full of photos you love, will you write the web address in the comments section and tell me why you love the photos? That would be a good way for me to learn.

My first picture was the morning view from my favorite window in the house.

(more…)

This is a guest post from Fabian Kruse. His blog is The Friendly Anarchist.

“May you live in interesting times,” a Chinese curse goes. It’s true: “Interestingness” is a dangerously broad term. Having a chronic illness can be interesting but it sucks. Wars can be interesting – but they suck even more. And maybe you too have used the classical “It tastes … interesting”-excuse when your dinner host didn’t really have a clue about cooking. Not as bad as wars and chronic illnesses, but still kind of sucky.

But interestingness in general is a lot more positive. Interestingness is finding the experiences that shape us as human beings, and enjoying them to the max. What we really don’t want is the bullshit part of life.

As far as I can see it, most of us want to live our lives something like this:

Sure, a bit more interestingness would be nice, but let’s be realistic, right? At least we’ll avoid the bullshit. (more…)

I want to finally end the bullshit of dividing women into categories of stay-at-home mom or working mom.

This is not just semantics: we are all working. It’s more than that. Here’s why.

Before I had my first child, in 2002, I had been bouncing between corporate jobs and fast-paced startups ten years, and I was earning a solid, six-figure salary. But I didn’t go back because I didn’t want to miss time with my son. By the time I had the baby we had used up all our savings (my husband, also, was not working), but I still didn’t go back to an office job because I wanted to stay home with my son.

But we needed money. So I wrote columns from our kitchen counter (I didn’t have a desk) when my son was sleeping. Sometimes I wrote columns while he was breastfeeding. I was deliriously tired, but I had to earn money. (more…)

It’s my birthday. So I get to write about anything. I get to indulge. The first thing is that I want to republish a poem that I published a long time ago, when I thought maybe I could get away with publishing poems on my blog. Now I know that for sure, poetry kills traffic.

But I like this poem so much:

Employed

by Beverly Rollwagen

She just wants to be employed

for eight hours a day. She is not

interested in a career; she wants a job

with a paycheck and free parking. She

does not want to carry a briefcase filled with important papers to read

after dinner; she does not want to return phone calls. When she gets home,

she wants to kick off her shoes and waltz around her kitchen singing, “I am

a piece of work.”

I like it maybe because it’s me. Sometimes I get tired of having to earn money. I have so many things I want to do, and it’s so distracting to have to earn money. I could have married someone with a lot of money and then I wouldn’t have to worry about earning money, but I didn’t choose that.

For the record, those dates went terribly. (more…)

Sixty-five percent of people in the white-collar world have workplace spouses. Jacqueline Olds, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, explains that because we spend so much time in the office, "these relationships can be critical to succeeding in today's work environment." CNN published a piece singing the praises of the workplace spouse, as "a wonderful support system among co-workers and makes a more productive worker."

Like all other life-saving, confidence-bolstering types of relationships, workplace spouse relationships are more common among the more highly paid. This is why I should have a workplace spouse.

Plus, I’m lonely on the farm. The problem with being lonely on the farm is not that I can’t find someone to cheat with. I’m a resourceful girl. The problem is that I wouldn’t cheat because I’d end up trying to keep it a secret and then I’d tell the farmer and then he’d hate me even more than he probably hates me right now.

It’s not that he hates me, actually. It’s that he’s sick of talking to me. He would like me to be more low maintenance. He does not want to talk and for sure is sick of me crying. So I am trying to stay away from him now. (more…)

Throughout my career, men have helped me every step of the way. Sometimes it was when I asked for help. Sometimes they saw I needed help even before I did, and they were there.

So you might think this is December-is-full-of-good-cheer-post  – you know, me thanking men for all they’ve done for me at work. But no. It’s me asking for even more. It’s my wish list for what else men could be doing.

This is not grand stuff. Okay. I mean, women are doing better in school than men, outearning men, and look, now even Time magazine says women don’t  need marriage as much as men do. So it’s not like women are in trouble. But still, men could do some stuff to make life better for women at work.

Here are some suggestions: (more…)

I have been spending my days with Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had to replace my house manager from Madison, and people told me that I should put an ad on the grocery-store bulletin board. That’s how people get jobs where I live now.  So I did that. I got two responses.

The job listing said $10/hr and Jeanenne said she’d do it for $20. That’s something I would do.  So I hired her. Everyone knows everyone in this town. And when I mentioned Jeanenne’s name, everyone said, “But she’s a Jehovah’s Witness.”

I didn’t really know what this meant. I mean, I knew that they’d probably say something like that about me, being (probably) the only Jewish family in the county. And I knew that when I was a latchkey kid, and Jehovah’s Witnesses would knock on our door,  I would often invite them in to talk.

They never made any sense to me.

Now I know why. Jehovah’s Witnesses are all about being happy. They are all about having the answers, knowing the rules, and following them to happiness.

1. The real path to happiness is contentment, and it looks a lot like hell.

Jeanenne recognizes that this is the big difference between us. She took this photo for me. She said, “The cow reminds me of you.”

I laughed right away. The cow has acres of land with corn and grass to feed on all day long. But she went to the edge of the fence and poked her head through to somewhere else. That’s how I am. (more…)

I'm always shocked to hear that people don’t like brown-nosing. If I could do it, I definitely would. But as someone who has Asperger's, brown-nosing always looks very difficult. So I have been looking for someone to teach me how to be better at brown-nosing, and finally, I found it.

First, here is research from James Westphal and Ithai Stern at Kellogg School of Management.  They found that being adept at ingratiating behavior was the number-one factor for getting positions at the top of the corporate ladder.

This is not surprising to me. What is surprising is that the research comes with a how-to provided (perhaps inadvertently) by the American Bar Association Journal.

According to the study, here are the traits that are most likely to be rewarded.

1) Frame flattery as advice-seeking. For example, you can ask, “How were you able to close that deal so successfully?”

2) Argue before accepting a manager’s opinion. (more…)

One of the posts on my blog that gets a lot of angry comments is the one where I explain why women should not report sexual harassment at work. The problem with reporting workplace sexual harassment is that none of us is going to change policy single-handedly. There is a huge risk with little reward if you report the harassment to human resources, because the law dictates that HR doesn’t focus on your problems—HR must protect the company, not you. When you report harassment, you become the company’s problem.

So a lot of people naturally ask, “How are we going to change things if no one reports the problem?” But no one changes corporate America by sacrificing her career. Which is what you end up doing if you report harassment. You lose your job. Not legally, but for some other reason. Because it’s so easy to fire someone and so smart for the company to fire anyone who complains about harassment.

You can say that’s unfair but you can’t say it’s not reality. You are better off taking care of harassment yourself, and staying in the game and getting power at work to make change. (more…)

You think it would be really fun to have sex with me. Because, I think you can tell from my posts, I’ll do anything. But maybe you can also tell from my posts that it’s a little bit weird. Because you know that I’ll say anything, too, but sometimes, I make you cringe.

I think I’m that way in bed, too.

This post is about work. And sex, which are two of the essential areas of life one needs to be able to function in before you can feel like a normal adult. And both sex and work are governed by a set of rules that many people are able to learn just by being in the world.

Asperger Syndrome compromises one’s ability to read nonverbal social cues. A simple example of this deficit is answering the question, “How are you?” It is loaded with so many nonverbal issues that I simply freeze. Even if you tell me, “Just say fine,” sometimes the situation looks special to me, and I can’t figure out why it’s special, so I can’t talk.

So I've spent my life teaching myself the rules for what to do in each social situation. I study people, make notes for myself, and then test the notes to see what other situations my notes apply to. To get a sense of how awkward this looks, here’s a video that is supposed to be a parody of people with Asperger’s interacting with each other. But my family has such a high proportion of people with Asperger’s that this video, honestly, is not far from what our life is like.

In my experience, the places with the most rules are work and sex. So, you can teach yourself the process of becoming better at work by applying the process of learning the rules about dating and sex. And vice versa. I, for example, am great at work rules and terrible at sex rules. So I teach myself using the reverse mechanism. (more…)

Maybe the reason that young people are optimistic in the face of a poor job market is that young people can probably do your job better than older people can.

The truth is, non-gen-y-workers have a bunch of shortcomings when it comes to competing with today’s workforce. Management consultant Stephen Denning has a great little history of management in his new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. He points out that managers of the 20^th century were trained to supervise people to get them to do stuff, to perform tasks. But now that most people are knowledge workers and not semi-skilled workers, we need managers who inspire, motivate, and encourage collaboration-managers, even, who care about the well-being of their employees and strive to make the workplace meaningful. And that’s not a corporate world where the older set is generally comfortable.

Yup, I’m arguing that Gen Y – that age-group that gets dumped on for acting all entitled – can teach everyone something about making it in the modern workforce. A lot, actually, because Gen Y is more prepared and has an advantage over older folks with far more experience. Here are areas where Gen Y can run circles around everyone at work:

1.  Productivity

Young people can find information faster and sort information faster than older people. For example, young people are more likely to use the best tool at the best time: They collaborate on wiki-type tools with ease. They crowdsource. They’re aces with downloading software onto the company laptop to become more productive and efficient. Think about it: Younger people don’t utter the phrase “information overload” because they don’t feel it; they benefit from the plasticity of the brain, which has adapted, over their Internet-based lives to process information faster.

Go to BNET to read the rest of this post.

The party in DC was at a bar, which is a difficult environment for me, because I never go to bars. We were the first ones there because it's our party. People started coming and I realized that the most awkward part of the party would be at the beginning, when you have to talk to whoever walks in because you can't pretend that you need to be talking to someone else. The most claustrophobic time of a party is when only a few people are there.

This is the broom closet I hid in.

Photis saw me go in. He said, "What are you doing?"

"Taking a break," I said. And I shut the door.

Remember when I told you Photis is a really good guy but a little bit weird? Here's a good example of that. At the broom closet he said, "Okay." And he walked back to the party.

I stayed in the closet thinking of how many people would need to be in the room before I could open the door. I thought that maybe everyone was getting drunk and that's what I should do to fit in. I wanted to talk to Ryan Paugh, who is my social skills guide for moments like this. But I couldn't talk to him because then I'd have to leave the closet. (more…)

This is a guest post from Ali Brown.

Two months ago, I wasn't satisfied with my job. I was a communications/administrative assistant. I'd been with the company almost two years, and it was clear there were no opportunities for advancement.

So, just weeks after turning 26 years old, I took a temp job.

I'm not a risk taker, and I was hesitant because accepting the new job meant giving up paid sick time, vacation time, and health insurance, which my employer paid for, and I have no guarantee that I'll be employed in January.

But the enjoyment I have after a 10-hour day confirms that I made the right choice. And I'm not alone. Nearly 28,000 people became temporary workers in September, and I don’t think it’s all due to people not being able to find full-time work. I think it’s because in many cases, a temp job is better than a full-time job.

I know no one dreams of being a temp worker, but it might be the best alternative in today’s economy. Here’s why you should do what I did: (more…)

Both WWII veterans I’ve known personally have largely ignored Veteran’s Day. But I never thought about it, really. I thought it was a holiday for them, not me. Lately, though, I think I do have an opinion. I think there is plenty wrong with Veteran’s Day.

1. What about all the other casualties of war?
For example, my mom and dad had me immediately after college graduation as a way to avoid the draft. I ask my mom and dad now how they could have been so incompetent as parents, yet so interesting in the world (really, everyone loves being around my mom, except her kids. It’s uncanny.) They each say that they had kids too young. They were totally unprepared.

So I see the war ruining many lives at home, but we only talk about people who fought at the front. It doesn’t make any sense to me. War ripples throughout society.

And what about all the women who keep things going while men go off to fight? What about the army wives who move their families around endlessly as the government moves their husbands? What about the kids who lived in 20 cities and never learned how to make a friend? What about the high divorce rate for people in the armed forces? Why are we only thanking veterans for giving their time? What about all the people who gave up safe, secure lives because one family member was in the armed forces? (more…)

The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that meditating is not a high priority.

First of all, if you don’t realize how much science there is behind meditation, you must be living under a rock. And the book I'm currently kvelling over, The Happiness Advantage, says that meditation, just five minutes a day, is one of the most reliable ways to increase our natural tendency toward happiness.

But I don’t want to sound too girly when I tell you to meditate. So I’m telling you instead that the Marine Corps is using meditation to help troops cope with the stress of warfare. Imagine fifty guys sitting cross-legged, eyes shut, with a rifle in every lap. The Marines were totally skeptical at first, of course, but in Men’s Journal (one of my favorite magazines) there’s a great article by Vanessa Gregory about how the Marines became believers. (This article is not online. Annoying. So here's a link to a Science Daily article about Marines meditating.)

Also, I don’t want to sound like an overly spiritualized hippie cliché, so I’m also telling you that I learned to meditate when I was playing professional beach volleyball. Many professional athletes meditate because at that level, everyone has the skills to be the best, but only a few have the mental strength to use those skills in the toughest moments. (more…)