- 10 tips for time management in a multitasking world
- 5 steps to taming materialism, from an accidental expert
- Blogging essential for a good career
- How much money do you need to be happy? Hint: Your sex life matters more.
- I’m moving out of New York City
- Make life more stable with more frequent job changes
- My financial history, and stop whining about your job
- My name is not really Penelope
- Navigating the quarterlife crisis
- What generation are you part of, really? Take this test
- What to do in college to be successful in your career
- Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school
I noticed in the New York Times Book Review last week, there was a nice review of Jim Krusoe’s new book, Girl Factory. I was happy to see that, because Jim Krusoe was my first—and most influential—writing teacher.
Jim teaches creative writing at Santa Monica College, (and his faculty page reveals so much about him). He lets anyone join the class, but you have to read your writing out loud. This weeds out almost everyone. Because first you have to write something. And then you have to let everyone rip it to shreds. In front of you.
But wait. It gets worse. Because Jim edits. He slashes most of the writing he reads. And then, if you’re new to the class, you assume he’s wrong, so you read out loud what he has cut and you hear it fall flat as soon as it leaves your lips.
Try it. Read something you wrote out loud to a friend. If it’s bad, you’ll feel right away that boredom has overcome the room. If you have even one flat sentence, you hear it when you read it out loud.
The first time Jim heard me read my writing, he said it was the best he'd heard anyone read in his class in a long time. Then he slashed everything I wrote for the next six years. Sometimes I’d hand in three pages of writing and he’d leave only five sentences.
But this is the thing about those five sentences: they were great. And here’s why I became a dedicated follower: Because I felt like he understood my compulsive need to write my life. And I understood his goal, which was to have interesting sentences. So when he cut full paragraphs that I thought were important because my sentences were boring, I felt grateful that he saved me from banality.
And I channel him every day that I write a post. I think to myself: Is this sentence one that Jim would cut?
I am not so arrogant as to think that Jim would even bother to read any of my sentences today. But I do know that the lessons I learned from Jim are the essence of good blogging. You can't be boring on a blog. People will stop reading.
So if you want to know how to write interesting paragraphs, read the authors who are famous for their ability to stun sentence by sentence. Try Jim Krusoe. Try literary types who sacrifice plot for prose: Ken Sparling, Martin Amis, Ann Beattie. (And, when you are feeling ambitious, Marcel Proust.)
I tell people all the time to pick a mentor rather than picking a job. Jim Krusoe is my first experience with this. He didn’t teach at a college I had ever heard of. And he didn’t even write books that I understood. But he is legendary for churning out well-respected writers, year after year.
Find a mentor with this reputation, and then work hard to make sure you each understand each others’ goals. What you’ll get out of this relationship is a new way to be more of your true self. And this is the best kind of job we can ask for.
We don’t have to find our true calling from a mentor. In fact, what I found from Jim was confidence to think that I should keep writing and see what happens. A good mentor opens doors, in our minds, and you can find that at any job, any company, anyplace your connection with someone is strong.
Welcome London Guardian readers, and thank you for visiting my blog. I write about careers, and often the advice I give includes stories from my own life. Here are some places to start reading that will give you a taste of this intersection of work and life.
Three columns leading up to the article you read about my divorce:
My First Day of Marriage Counseling
Five Communications Lessons Learned in Marriage Counseling
A Case Study in Staying Resilient: My Divorce
Five popular career advice columns from the past:
Five Steps to Taming Materialism from an Accidental Expert
What Generation are You Part of, Really? Take this Test.
Bad Career Advice: Do What You Love
Five Situations when You Shouldn't Go to Graduate School
You can scroll down this page to see the most recent columns I’ve written. And you can find popular ones on the sidebar to the right. If you’d like me to send columns to your in box, please send an email to penelope@penelopetrunk.com with “subscribe” in the subject line.
Thank you,
Penelope
When I started doing Twitter, I put my Twitter feed on the sidebar of my blog. It seemed smart: more content means more traffic, and more traffic is good. But after two weeks of Twitter, I removed it. And then, when I was blogging about important topics like ditching Hebrew school as a career harbinger, commenters asked what happened to my Twitter feed.
Well, the Twitter feed is right here on Twitter. Just like my LinkedIn profile is on LinkedIn, and the potted plants I’ve collected on Facebook are on Facebook. Because mashing our social media together for the purpose of marketing one feed to another dilutes the value of social media. If you express yourself in the same way on a blog and on Twitter, then you don’t need both.
Each of us is multi-faceted. With a selection of media to choose from, we can express different parts of ourselves in different ways.
It’s clear to me that blogging is best for expressing big ideas. If you can’t convey new ideas on your blog, then you probably won’t get a lot of traffic. And most blogs that do well have a single theme and the audience can depend on the theme dictating the content of the blog. But Twitter is not good for fleshed-out ideas. I see people using Twitter for a lot of stuff, but not for fleshed-out ideas. And Flickr is good for expressing passion. Way better than, say, Twitter.
So it strikes me as really lame that we have such a wide range of media at our disposal yet people are using that range to convey the same aspect of themselves: the personal brand they are creating for social media.
Ironically, personal branding mostly rewards consistency, and using different media for different aspects of ourselves is not typically what builds brands. But none of us is so narrow to fit completely into the brand we present on a blog. There is more to each of us.
So I am playing with Twitter right now, seeing what part of me feels most natural to be in Twitter. This is the same thing we do as we make a new friend. We figure out what combination of the things that make up our personality will be best with this person. That’s why we’re a little different with each person we know.
As it turns out, Twitter feels very intimate to me. It’s a small burst, and small means intimate. It’s never a rant, because there’s not enough room, and it’s always immediate because—in keeping with Twitter conventions—it’s about “what I’m doing now.”
Mashing all social media together to create one image of ourselves doesn’t make sense because we are all already accustomed to showing certain parts of ourselves only in certain parts of our lives. We all know, for instance, that women don’t talk about blow jobs at work, even though they give plenty of them. And men don’t talk about the details of project management on a date, because they’d never get another blow job. It’s acceptable to have different places in your life for different aspects of your personality. So don’t flatten yourself by presenting only perfect consistency across Twitter and LinkedIn and blogs and Facebook.
Also, people who want to meet you in one format, won’t necessarily want to meet you in another, and that’s fine. Jason Warner, at Google, for example, explained that he doesn’t want to check out your MySpace photos before he hires you because it’s not the part of you he’s expecting to show up at work.
I actually already have experience switching media for different parts of me, and I’m telling you, it has served me well: I got into graduate school in Boston University based on my ability to write about sex. I spent my time in grad school writing hypertext fiction. I lectured at Brown University, I lectured at the Sorbonne, and I’m in Wikipedia for my sex writing — in hypertext. But when I had the opportunity to write career advice, I knew hypertext wasn’t the right format. So I started over, with a different way of thinking, in a different medium.
Sometimes I call this a braided career. Sometimes I call this bad branding. It’s a fine line. And some people will say that if you’re truly integrated, you will be your same self everywhere. I disagree. I think that the most socially adept people highlight the parts of themselves that will be most interesting to the people at hand.
So I am keeping Twitter separate. I want to play and explore and I don’t care about being consistent with my brand there. I want to show another part of myself on Twitter—a part that I wouldn’t necessarily show on the blog.
What is social media for, really? If traffic is your holy grail, then you need to point all your social media to one spot, in a sort of exercise in cross-pollination. If it’s not to build traffic, then it’s to build connections. And those connections can improve your life.
So give yourself permission to use social media to explore all the aspects of your personality, rather than just the one you picked for your “official personal brand”. It makes sense that you should give yourself some leeway to be inconsistent in who you are—and thereby consistent with who are completely are—in social media. Explore your full identity as you explore the media.
I got an email from this guy who told me he thinks I need a friend on a farm. I think he wrote the email right after I wrote about being a pint-sized ENTJ on the estate-sized front lawn of my grandma’s house. I am not sure how he knew I am fascinated with farms, but I am. And I’m always curious about how family farms work here in Wisconsin: what life is like, and why do people keep choosing that?
He invited me and my kids. He told me the farm was more than an hour out of Madison. Ten minutes out of Madison is farmland, so more than an hour out is really hard core. I went to a farmer’s market with my oldest son to check out the farmer, to make sure he wasn’t an ax murderer or something.
To be honest, I couldn’t tell from looking at the farmer’s market. Really, even an ax murderer has to have a job. I asked for his phone number, in case I got lost on the way to the farm. He told me it was a party line — a term I haven’t heard anyone use in real life. He also said his parents might answer the phone.
“You live with them?!?!” I tried not to sound judgmental. I write all the time about how living with your parents is a good idea. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how Norman Bates lived with his mom.
The farmer said, “Don’t worry, I’m not Amish.”
I thought that was charming. I mean, of course I didn’t worry that he was Amish because I don’t know anyone who is Amish. I didn’t even know there were Amish people in Wisconsin. But you can learn a lot about someone by how they choose to reassure you. And somehow this was so genuine that I was, actually, reassured.
The farm was really in the middle of nowhere. It was in Wisconsin, but it would be a suburb of Dubuque, Iowa, if Dubuque had suburbs. I had to call twice because I thought I was lost. Both times, the farmer said that I was actually following directions just fine.
The farmer lived in a town of 500 people. None of whom I could see from his farm.
I parked my car in the middle of his dirt road. Or his front lawn. They were sort of the same. There were fields everywhere. It was every farm: Red barn, white house, green fields.
The first thing I said to him: “What are you doing out here? All alone? Who do you talk to? You don’t even have a real phone.”
He smiled. He said he had friends.
I looked around and decided his friends were very far away.
It turns out, though, that his friends had kids. He had “city friends” and they brought their kids to visit the farm. The place was tricked out for kids: a rope for swinging, baby chicks to hold, baby pigs to pet, and ten cats he let my son feed. We walked to the field with the cattle, past the hens and roosters, alongside the vegetable garden that was for the pigs to eat, stepping through the barbed-wire fence. The farmer scanned his field for the herd of cattle, and my son held his hand while we traipsed toward the cattle.
“I don’t get it. You read my column and sent me an email to come to your farm?”
“I wouldn’t send an email to a syndicated newspaper columnist. I saw the note at the bottom of your column about your blog. So I started reading your blog. And then I bought your book. And then I wrote to you.”
“You read career advice?”
He thought my question was funny. “I’m an entrepreneur. And I read your blog because you write a lot about entrepreneurship.”
“You’re an entrepreneur?”
“Farming is changing a lot. It’s a lot like what you say about how corporations won’t take care of you and you have to take care of yourself.”
The farmer told me about how the buy-local movement is great for his farm. It’s increasing profits for farmers who can shift their business model.
He called out sort of a bird call (but deeper, for cattle) and the herd walked toward us. I thought there would be a stampede like in a movie, but they just came to say hi.
My son fed grass to snot-dripping Angus cattle and I asked the farmer if these cattle are those organic, grass-fed cattle that I see at Trader Joe's.
The farmer said that they are hormone free and grass fed, but he doesn’t get certified organic. It’s just jumping through hoops for the government and he doesn’t need to do that in order to sell to socially conscious restaurants. I liked that he was cutting corners. I liked that he knew which details to ignore.
I asked him how he knew what to write to me in an email, and he said that today, the family farm is about marketing. “It was a sales pitch,” he said. “I thought you had a problem and I thought I could solve it.”
I thought of all the problems I have and tried to remember which one he said he was solving. I felt like there were so many he could solve, but if he had mentioned them all, I’d have never responded to his email.
On the way back to the house through the field, he told me he thought I needed a place I could go that was peaceful. He told my son not to step in cow pies. We ducked under the electric fence. He told me it wasn’t on, but he wanted us to practice because it might be on the next time we came.
I got excited that he thought there would be a next time. I thought my life could be very peaceful here, as I looked out on the fields like they could fill my days. I made a note to see how much it would cost to get wireless Internet at his house.
We arrived at the farm at 5pm, so I brought dinner. My son and I are two of the pickiest eaters in the world, but I wanted to bring something that the farmer would like to eat. I brought chicken wraps and vegetable wraps. And I brought bagels for me, because I eat them almost every meal. I brought desert so I seem fun. And I brought popcorn for my son because that’s one of the only things I know he’d eat that would occupy him for the duration of an adult meal.
“I know there’s a lot of food,” I said. “You can keep what we don’t eat.”
“I don’t know if I’d eat it all,” he said. “Maybe you should take back the cupcakes.”
“Just throw out everything you don’t want,” I said.
I looked at the farmer. That did not go over well. “Um. You don’t throw out food, do you?”
“Not really. No.”
I thought about throwing out an Angus steak that I grew and slaughtered myself. It would be impossible. I didn’t know what to say. Next to my farmer, I looked less like an environmentally-conscious city person and more like a heathen.
I told my son he had to eat two mini-Gouda cheeses before the popcorn. Mostly for show. So the farmer thought I didn’t let my kid eat popcorn for dinner. The farmer had never seen Gouda cheese. So he put one on his plate. Along with a bagel.
The farmer asked if we give thanks before a meal. I looked at him, speechless. I think because I want to be a person who gives thanks, but I could tell he was a person who really did give thanks.
He asked if it was okay. And how could I say no, it’s not okay to give thanks?
So the farmer thanked God for our food and our safe trip.
And my son ate extra cheese and looked very healthy.
And I thanked God that my blog introduces me to people who can change my life.
_______________________________________________________________
Other posts about the farmer:
How I started taming my workaholic tendencies
Self-sabotage is never limited to just one part of your life
One of the most dangerous things you can do in your career is to think you are different from everyone else. The biggest validation of that idea comes in AA meetings — it is widely understood by this group that thinking you’re different is just an excuse not to get help, an excuse to think you live outside what we already know to be true. It’s a dangerous way to live because you are reinventing the wheel for yourself and you risk just spinning in place.
Yet we jump through hoops to convince ourselves that we are different from everyone else and the experience of others does not apply to us. Daniel Gilbert found, for example, that most of us think we are worse jugglers than average, and most football players think they are better than average, but most people really are — surprise — just average. Gilbert has also shown that we are terrible at making decisions for ourselves, in part, because we think we’re special.
If you stop thinking you are so special, then you can learn from watching others, you can take advice from people who have been there before, and you can make decisions based on tried and true methods.
So finally, here's an example of this problem in action: a blogger gets on the cover of the New York Times magazine, Emily Gould. She talks about how her boyfriend hates that she blogs about him. Of course this hits close to home. But, it’s old news. I’ve already spent 20 years only dating/marrying/then dating people who will put up with me chronicling their every move.
So here’s another way for Emily to think: Instead of thinking that she’s so special because she’s blogging about her own life and everyone is knowing her through that, she could look at what has come before her. Women have been writing about their relationships forever, in transparent ways. It’s what women write about. And sometimes, it destroys relationships. But for forever, some women have been absolutely driven to put their life in words. They can’t stop. Emily is part of that history.
And so am I, so I know the history pretty well. Anne Frank did it, too — in the face of war. And Edith Wharton did it — risking the wrath of her high-end social circles. And Colette did it — with any guy who would put up with it, including her editor.
When I was a child, Anne Frank spoke to me not because she was documenting war, but because she understood that in some people, the drive to write down what is happening is stronger than anything else.
I told this to my divorce lawyer last week when he told me would not represent me if I didn’t stop writing about my divorce. He told me that he can’t represent me if I am undermining my case in my blog. I told him there is nothing worth saving more than my ability to document my life. I told him that somewhere, my husband understood this, because I published weekly documentation of our courtship — which focused on him never going down on me and me being pissed off–and we still got married. At that point, there is nothing left to hide. I told my lawyer it’s how I run my life, and I don’t know how else to do a life.
In the history of documenting one’s life–I hate to be snippy–but Emily Gould is no great example. The stakes are not very high for her. And relative to what other women have gone through, the stakes are not high for me, either. After all, I married someone who had already signed up for this life. Heather Armstrong is maybe a good example of the stakes being very high, because her blog, Dooce, includes her daughter so often.
But the poster-child for a woman going through hell in order to document her life is the photographer, Sally Mann. When I bought her monograph, Immediate Family, I had no idea it was controversial. I only knew that I was mesmerized by how the photos of her children captured the pain of adolescence, the edgy gross innocence of childhood and the closeness of a family’s bond: All at once. Every photo.
But stores wouldn’t sell it. They called it pornography. And people accused Sally Mann of child abuse for making pornography from her kids.
In Sally Mann’s eyes, she was just documenting her family life, and her love for her kids, and the fun of childhood. And with an open mind, you can see that in the photos. Wait. I’ll link to some (probably not safe for work).
Herman Melville is another great example of the stakes being much higher than Emily, or me. Melville had many children, whom he did not really support. He found his family depressing, and he thought his writing was too important to be distracted with the task of family life.
The history of obsessive writers destroying lives around them is not new. The history of writers feeling an insanely huge need to tell something to the world at all costs is not new.
So back to careers. In the New York Times, Emily portrays her career as anomalous, eccentric, and so difficult to manage that she needs to quote magazine articles to her therapist in order to describe her life. But if you put Emily in historical context—which I would have expected the NYT magazine to do—there are a lot of people who have paved the way for her. She can learn from lots of people who came before blogging, how to manage one’s career as a blogger.
And this is true for most of us.Very few of us ever have a totally unique career problem. Most problems come down to five or ten situations that happen all the time. I think we get clouded by the specifics of our own story, and that makes us unable to see why we are just like everyone else. Each person’s details are different, but the problems we have repeat themselves over and over again—especially in careers. That’s why a community of people helping each other with their careers works so well. That’s why I love my blog.
So take time to figure out why you are the same, instead of focusing on why you’re different. There is a community out there who can help you. This is true for everyone. Anyway, it’s not that interesting to operate as if we are the only person like us. None of us should reinvent the wheel by ourselves. Ever. It’s too lonely.
My career is built on branding. The first time I tried it was in beach volleyball. Like many professional sports, the way to make a living is from sponsors. While other people changed partners every week trying to trade up for someone better, I picked someone shorter than I was, so she’d stick with me. Then I focused more energy on branding us as a team to sponsors than I did on winning tournaments. We stood out because other people marketed themselves as individuals, not a team. So let me give a shout out to Dance France, for all the logos they had me splash across my butt: Victory for brand management.
Today, of course, I’m all about brand. I am constantly trying to figure out how to make the Brazen Careerist brand stand for the network instead of for me. It’s sort of a game. And the game feels really fun when I read about other companies playing with their brand, like Under Armour marketing cross-trainers: Fascinating to me.
I also go ballistic about my brand. Like when my volleyball partner dumped me because I didn’t have a killer instinct. I ranted about how winning one more match would not change her life, but having the sponsors that I got her was a big deal. We were in the top five teams in the country when it came to the number of sponsors we had. (She didn’t care.)
And I went ballistic this week when the social media guru we hired used the Brazen Careerist brand name for twitter without considering that I am completely enthralled with twitter and without considering that there would be brand confusion if there is a Brazen Careerist twitter that is not me. I left threatening messages to Ryan on his cell phone during long layovers in faraway airports, trying to regain control of my twitter brand before it imploded.
So, this is all to say that I love a good corporate branding moment. There are lots of ways to enhance your brand. I did a beach volleyball commercial for Budweiser, for example. But I didn’t feel all warm and fuzzy. So I really appreciate times when people manage their brand by being warm and fuzzy, like these:
1. Google’s art contest for kids. The kids riff on the theme “What if?” There are a lot of what if Google made world peace? But there are really cool ones like, “What if everything I drew came to life?”
2. The Westin Spa in Scottsdale has everyone wear a name tag that has not only their name, but also their passion. I love that this is a nod to the fact that people are not defined completely by their job, but by what excites them in their life.
Each name tag reminded me to see the person, not just the job, by revealing something about them that went beyond the work I saw them doing. Passions I remember: Piano, computers, learning. Passions that people probably edited: Sex, drugs, money. But still, just that there is something else there besides the name, even if it’s G-rated and maybe not true, serves a purpose and makes me like Westin more.
When people ask me to explain what the Brazen Careerist company does, I always have a hard time answering. Bad, right? What CEO doesn’t have a pitch? The answer I usually give is that we help companies connect with young talent. But the pitch I believe most is the one that makes me feel warm and fuzzy: we help amplify the voice of young people online.
I wish I could say that more often without feeling like a cheese ball. In corporate life, it’s always safer to talk about the bottom line, and then, far away from the boardroom, when no one’s looking, you sneak in a nice touch that allows everyone to feel good about what they are doing.
I wish it were the other way around. But someone’s gotta fund those name tags, right?
Let me first say that my lawyer is not happy when I blog about my divorce. But now that I’ve been in a front-page article of the New York Times for blogging about the divorce, I think we’ve passed the point of discretion.
And anyway, I think it’s okay to blog because I am the transparent type, so it would be weird for me to have this huge thing in my life and not write anything about it. How is this blog at the intersection of work and life if I cut out the life?
Also, I noticed that Nino has started commenting on my recent divorce posts, and he seems to be updating my family about our divorce via Facebook, so at this point I feel that all is fair in social media. And maybe working out one’s divorce is going to be the killer app for Twitter.
So the first thing I’ve done to make sure the divorce doesn’t undermine my career is that I’m not pretending that it is irrelevant to my career. But here are some other steps I’ve decided are important for trying to keep both the divorce and the career on track.
1. Surround yourself with smart people. They’ll help you make faster progress.
I hired the two top attorneys. As if there is top anything in little Madison, Wisconsin. But alas, in any sea, there are big fish. I spend most of my time worrying that Nino routinely complains of me stealing our marital assets. Like, he’ll mention it while we’re watching a soccer game, or under his breath taking the kids to violin class.
Usually this accusation is reserved for men who buy a yacht and a condo for a hot little mistress and twelve first-class airfares to see her. So the accusation won’t hold for me. But still, my attorney decided that our best strategy is make sure that Nino has a great attorney so it is two smart lawyers who are used to negotiating with each other and things will go faster.
I hope this is a good strategy. If my site starts loading slower you’ll know that the lawyers have been so expensive that I had to cut back on bandwidth.
2. Be consistent — be the same in the divorce as you’d be in your work
Our first official divorce fight was Nino refusing to refer to me as Penelope in his emails. I told him he has to use Penelope, but I tried to say it in a nice email so that we were not having animosity. In my heart of hearts I still believe the most important thing is to be nice.
So we tried. He wrote a long email about how my old name—which I’m not even writing here because I’m so done with it—is more appropriate. I ignored the email. He ignored my pleas. It’s like we’re still married. Oh. Wait. We are.
3. Keep a sense of humor — it gives you fresh perspective.
Surprisingly though, our efforts to downplay the divorce animosity are paying off. For example, on Mother’s Day, Nino agreed to go on a hike with me and our kids and our eight-year-old neighbor who spends tons of time at our house. It was a big favor for him to do because I’m the one who really wants the kids to feel like we’re still a family, and I’m the one who likes hiking.
On the hike, the boys comforted me by being their normal boy selves, and they turned mud piles into cannon balls and every long stick became a sword. We sat down to rest at a campsite.
Nino said, “Wow, they have everything at the campsite, even a place to chop wood. If you have a hatchet.”
The eight-year-old neighbor says, “We have a hatchet at our house. My mom’s boyfriend bought it for her last Valentine’s Day.”
Nino and I looked at each other, incredulous, and smiled. And for one, small second I felt like we were a family—the parents sharing an inside joke while the kids try to kill each other.
4. Be a good time manager; the divorce takes time, so manage it well
Ignoring the fact that my lawyer’s time is probably more expensive than mine, I had him meet me at McDonald’s. I had breakfast with my two-year-old and then, while he was crawling up and down in Ronald’s Playland, I gave my lawyer a summary of our debts and assets. My son asked two or three times who the guy was. I said, “It’s my friend, Allan.” And as I said it I thought maybe this would make it so I get the hourly rate for friends. (Do divorce lawyers have any friends?)
My son offered Allan an ice cream, which he declined, (and then Allan’s clock ticked in Playland while I bought my son the most expensive ice cream ever purchased.) Then my son asked if Allan wanted to go down the slide. He asked if Allan was coming to our house. All this made me wonder about eventually bringing home some guy to live with us. Though honestly I can’t wrap my head around integrating another man into our life beyond some guy coming to Playland with us.
But I know it happens. I know that somehow women work this out in their lives. And since I learn so fast from stories, could people write stories in the comments section about how they introduced a step-parent successfully?
5. Be honest. If you are shady about your divorce people will think you’re shady about everything.
It would be so fake to tell you that I’m not worried. I’m very worried.
I’m worried that I’ll never fall in love. That’s normal, right? I mean, I know it’s normal if you are fifteen and get dumped, so it must be true now, too.
I’m also worried about money. How does anyone separate their career from their divorce? A divorce comes with a promise to earn a certain amount of money. All the things I’ve done in my life to insure that I have flexibility to do whatever career I want could be going down the tubes. I’m very scared about that.
I also worry that you are only reading this stuff because I’m a train wreck. People like reading about other peoples’ divorces because they feel better about keeping their own marriage together. So, okay. I hope I can make some of you feel smug today, because sometimes I write posts and I’m the one feeling smug. We should all get our chance.
I love that each twitter has to be 140 characters. I love the game of that. Word choice is so important. I am not prolific, but I am infatuated.
I think that most of the blog readers here don’t use twitter, so I wanted to let you know that my recent twitters are listed on the sidebar of my blog, and you should read them because I love writing them so much.
I am enticing you with two:
Friday I leave chocolates for the guy in the next office. Maybe I like him. Today they are still there, and I have PMS, so I eat them.
My second book is very late. Barack and I have the same book editor. His fame keeps my editor distracted, so I give money to his campaign.
You can see all 21 twitters listed here:
Contact
penelope@penelopetrunk.com