"If this sounds spiteful and ugly it is. But I think it is also appropriate, and who else would say it besides me?"

Wrote Penelope Trunk, guessing that Sheryl Sandberg's husband, David Goldberg, had killed himself and that he may have done so because she "leaned" into her job too much. (We later learned that Goldberg died in an accident on an exercise treadmill.)

In New York Magazine, Marin Cogan gets quite hostile to Trunk.

But instead of apologizing for her mistake, Trunk doubled down on the idea that he killed himself... If you’ve never read her, the posts come across as inexplicably cruel...

I’m not sure what exactly made me turn away from Trunk’s blog. I don’t think it was any one specific post, but the gradual realization, upon closer reading, that my friends and I were mistaken in assuming that Trunk’s brazen careerism was a feminist project in any meaningful sense. Some of her posts read more like trolling than genuine advice.... Not that long after I stopped reading it, the tone of the blog got dark...

"Kids need taking care of. Money needs earning. Those are two very unequal jobs. You can’t split them equally..."

"... because they are not half-time jobs. So you might think I’m a throw-back to the ’50s when I say, stay-at-home dads is a bad idea. You might think I am self-hating when I say that women don’t crave power as much as men do. But don’t say I don’t understand how hard women fought for equality. Because I was part of that fight. I gave up my childhood for the fight for women’s equality."

Writes Penelope Trunk, who says she resisted something her grandmother said for a long time, but finally "realized there’s positively no way to keep things equal, and everyone suffers from trying to establish equality. People can only give what they are good at giving. And people can’t stop needing what they need. It’s what they need."

"It would be unlike me to write about the promise of spring without mentioning that spring is suicide season."

"There are a lot of theories about why spring has the most suicides, but the majority of the theories take into account the relationship between spring and loneliness."

The 3rd-to-the-last paragraph of "There’s a high price to hiding from the need to transition," at Penelope Trunk's blog.

Here's some friend-making advice: "circle... sniff... okay... from now on we'll be old friends."

"I make a lot of money but I spend most of it on people who help me to do things so I can keep making money."

"For example, I have an assistant, a driver, a nanny, an editor, and a research maven. None are full-time but all make my life much better. I think I make their lives better, too, because I’m good at delegating," says Penelope Trunk, introducing her 3 rules of delegating.

"The bottom line of a good job is that it makes you feel..."

"... like you have unlimited energy for your work because it’s so fulfilling."

"The story of Jason Collins is not just a story about being gay."

"It’s a story about how, to some degree, each and every one of us is scared to be ourself at work. Each of us has something we are scared to own about ourselves because we are scared people won’t like us. We’re scared the top people in our field won’t respect or like us. We each hide something that we think is particularly bad. And we all think, 'Other people might not need to hide this, but for me, it’s different.'"

"The real issue we have with admitting that college is not a path to the work world is then we have to ask ourselves why we send our kids to high school."

"There is plenty of data to show that teens are able to manage their lives without the constraints of school."

The book Escaping the Endless Adolescence is chock full of data, and a recent article by my favorite journalist, Jennifer Senior, shows that high school is not just unnecessary, but actually damaging to teens who need much more freedom to grow than high school affords.

"Let’s have universal protests about the stupidity of school instead of universal pre-K."

"Let’s enable lower-income kids to have the benefit of being told their time is too precious to sit in school all day."

"15 Things Overachievers Do."

Penelope Trunk's list is — in typical Trunk style — highly provocative, full of surprising details and counterintuitiveness.

2. They use pharmaceuticals. Adderall is de rigeur [sic] for the high-powered jobs in high-powered cities...

8. They get pregnant at 25. If they’re a woman, that is. It’s clear that only a very small, anomalous group of women can have a high-powered job when they have young kids. So women should make a plan to have kids early, and then they can position themselves for a high-powered job once their kids are all grown up....

12. They don’t write books. The book industry is dead. They have no control over distribution channels and they have no control over author publicity, so the value publishers add in the book business is pretty much zero.... So for now, if you have an idea, put it in a blog. Harvard Business Review says that people who are serious about ideas are blogging.

13. They don’t let themselves get fat....

Read the whole thing... and this other thing that — in accordance with item #15 — she stole the idea from.

"[P]eople who want to take care of people and can’t stand doing work that doesn’t relate to that should probably be parents."

"There are very few jobs that are truly just taking care of people. And most of them pay very poorly, if at all. So you may as well do it for your own family, where the pay is not so important. It’s ridiculous that we don’t think of taking care of a family as a career path. That’s a good path for some people. Just like earning a shit-load of money is a good career path for other people. In fact, those two types of people should marry each other."

Penelope Trunk writes the smartest thing I've read in a long while. The post is titled "Secrets of successful yoga studios, and tactics to examine ideas that suck."

"The new job that everyone wants is stay-at-home mom. This makes sense to me."

"It’s clear that women don’t want to bust through the glass ceiling, or they’d have done it by now. And it’s clear that men are not pulled by kids in nearly the same way women are, because women’s careers tank when they have kids and mens’ careers don’t."

That's Penelope Trunk, noting a new Forbes survey that says 84% of working women want to stay home with kids. Forbes notes that "more than one in three resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality." Resentment is a bad place to be. I like these 2 items from Trunk's advice:

"The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school."

Writes Penelope Trunk (in a post titled "Blueprint for a Woman’s Life," which she wrote last August but keeps in her sidebar under the heading "Big Ideas"):

We all know that learning is best when it’s customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.

It’s clear is that homeschooled kids will rule the world when Generation Z enters the workplace. So figure out a way to alleviate mommy guilt by homeschooling your kids to get them on that path. You don’t have to do the teaching yourself. You can pay someone. But you need to get your kids out of a system that everyone knows does not work. (Note: I just realized this. This month. And last week, I decided: I’m taking my kids out of school.)

It was interesting reading that right after reading this HuffPo piece by George Lakoff (and a co-author) called "The Wisconsin Blues." The main point is that progressives need better messaging. The conservatives always manage to put things in terms that resonate with people better, don't you know? Anyway, in his effort to improve left-wing propaganda, Lakoff has this about public schools (which I feel like calling government schools):

[D]emocracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world. No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public....

Public schools are essential to opportunity... They are also essential to democracy, since democracy requires an educated citizenry at large, as well as trained professionals in every community. Without education of the public, there can be no freedom.

At issue is the future of progressive morality, democracy, freedom, and every aspect of the Public -- and hence the viability of private life and private enterprise in America on a mass scale. The conservative goal is to impose rule by conservative morality on the entire country, and beyond. Eliminating unions and public education are just steps along the way. Only progressive moral force can stop them.

Discuss!

"I used to love blogging. I ate it, drank it, and slept on it at night."

"Then I became a consultant and professional blogger, earning a living giving advice and blogging for others.... Now I hardly blog at all. I returned to what I intended to do in the first place, before I’d ever heard of blogs: freelance writing."

Writes La Shawn Barber, who'd just run across an interview she did back in 2006, when she loved blogging. "Nothing profound. It just brought back memories."

From the old interview: "The more you blog, the more you love it, the more you have to say.... You need to blog because you like, or love, to do it."

The things that we do for love — and truly love — may be things we wouldn't love at all if it were paid work. Sex is an obvious example of that sort of thing. Here's a great old blog post by Penelope Trunk: "Bad career advice: Do what you love."

I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex. In fact, as you might imagine, my sex life is really tanking right now. But I don’t sit up at night thinking, should I do writing or sex? Because career decisions are not decisions about “what do I love most?” Career decisions are about what kind of life do I want to set up for myself?...

If you are lost, and lonely, and wondering how you’ll ever find your way in this world. Take a job. Any job. Because structure, and regular contact with regular people, and a method of contributing to a larger group are all things that help us recalibrate ourselves....

"Divorce is immature and selfish. Don't do it."

Says Penelope Trunk (who got divorced 4 years ago). I — who got divorced 22 years ago — agree with her. (Except to the extent that her pronouncement is phrased in absolute terms, which I doubt she believes. And not everyone who experiences divorce can be said to "do" it. It can be done to you.)

1. Divorce is a cliche among people in denial....

2. Divorce is nearly always terrible for kids. Your case is not the exception....

3. Divorce is for dumb people....

4. Divorce reflects mental illness....

5. Divorce is often a career issue....

Bullet points fleshed out at the link.

"I thought I’ll only be alive for maybe a minute longer, so I only have to keep trying to figure out how to save my life for one more minute."

"I told myself I can’t give up until I pass out. I remember that I hoped for a fast death. Then something switched in me. I was okay dying.... Now I realize that the time when I could not breathe was probably less than a minute. I had accepted the pain and my death after only 30 seconds."

Penelope Trunk describes her post-9/11 path, from high achievement in New York City to retreat, of a kind, in Wisconsin.

Who would seek this gift of knowing what you would think if you believed you were living the last 30 seconds of your life? But if that gift arrived... what would it look like?

Is traveling a good use of your time?

I keep trying to leave Madison, Wisconsin, and wondering why it never quite happens these days. Today, I ran across "4 reasons traveling is a waste of time," a blog post that Penelope Trunk wrote a couple years ago. It resonated. Especially #3: "People who love their lives don't leave."

Imagine if you were excited to get out of bed every day because you had structured your life so that every day was full of what you have always dreamed of doing. And you were in love with your boyfriend, and your job, and your new handstand in yoga. You love it all—imagine that. Would you want to leave all that behind for two weeks? What would be the point? You'd have more fun at home than away from home. So instead of traveling somewhere, how about figuring out what you'd really love to be doing with your time, and do that? In your real, day-to-day life.

Someone in the comments groused: "You are describing 5% or less of the population."

Today, it was was 67° here, and I took a walk along the lake path...



.... and through a garden....

"Take a picture of my pie. I need a picture."/"No. You’ll write that my rhubarb cobbler sucked and your pie was great."

Penelope Trunk writes about what do do if you think you're getting fired — and, most bloggishly — includes a lot of rhubarb, interpersonal dramedy, goat cheese, home repair, absurd photography, and career advice like: "wait for the words, 'You’re fired.' And then, no matter what words lead up to that phrase, say, 'I’m sorry you feel that way. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.'"

"So I love this commercial because it captures the shared experience of Generation X."

"We like being home to make our kids peanut butter and jelly. You could not sell Baby Boomers with this. They think it’s lame to sit in a kitchen waiting for your kid to be hungry. We like having a male breadwinner and we’re not afraid to say it. And we are surrounded by little boys in love with Star Wars...."

"How you answer the question 'What do you do?' is important..."

"... because it frames your story for you in a much more visceral way than it frames it for anyone else."

"How to get a workplace spouse to fill in the gaps in your marriage."

Penelope Trunk talks about why you might want to develop a relationship like this — not for sex! — and gives 5 rules:

1. Identify a relationship with a high chance for success....

2. Talk about a taboo topic.

Once a girl starts talking about sex, then the boy starts talking about sex....

3. Blur the normal boundaries between co-workers....

4. Ask for what you want....

5. Find a good balance between the official relationship and the unofficial relationship....

I smell trouble. Lots of trouble. Whatever happened to friends? Trunk tells us she has a husband who wants sex but is "sick of talking" to her. She wants someone to talk to and asserts that "when workplace spouse relationships do cross the line into the sex department, the relationship goes bad." But you can't neatly control relationships, and they do "go bad" — in many unpredictable ways.