I’ve lived on my own (or with various roommates) off and on for more than ten years. I’ve moved a few times and rearranged my bedroom a few times more than that. I think I’ve finally figured out how to create a bedroom that is truly ideal for a single woman.

Here are the five key features of a great bedroom for a single gal:

1. It feels safe. I think it’s really important for single women to feel safe in their beds (especially if they live alone!) Safety could mean lots of pillows to cuddle up with or windows that lock or lights that are easy to reach from the bed. It means different things to different women but I think it’s always important.
2. It’s pretty. I like having a bedroom that’s pretty. My definition of pretty has changed over the years and grown up a bit over time (or at least I’d like to think so) but I’ve always tried to pretty up my bedroom in some way.
3. It’s also comfortable. Pretty and safe are important features but mostly the room has to be comfortable. It has to have good energy. The bed has to be comfy. It’s the place where you spend at least eight hours of each day if not more so it should be a place where every seat feels totally comfortable.
4. It serves multiple functions. Almost all of my bedrooms have served multiple functions (especially when living with roommates). Most often, it’s been a bedroom as well as a library and office. It’s also usually had a sofa in it that people could sleep on if they stayed over.
5. It’s up to date. I don’t mean that my bedroom has to have trendy furniture and modern art. Instead, I mean that it needs to be up to date with me. My bedrooms always reflect my current passions, moods and beliefs. I think that this is important.

What do you think are the most important features of a bedroom for a woman who lives alone?

Tags: bedroom, decorating, houzz, Interior Design, kathryn vercillo, rooms, single, women

I was a smart enough chick to be a bit of an odd kid. I started talking at around four months and started reading by the age of two and I imagine that it must have been more than a bit strange to look at me carrying on a decently smart conversation with popsicle smeared all over my mouth. I was a smart kid. However, I was no genius or child prodigy.

Child prodigies really interest me. These are kids who are so good at one area of study that they excel on an adult level before the age of 13. These are the kids who compose music when their peers are watching cartoons. These are the kids that can do math at a level I’ll never reach before they can reach the water fountain without a step stool. These are the kids who start college before they start puberty.

I’m particularly interested by female child prodigies. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, there just aren’t that many women listed in lists of female prodigies. Second of all, these women tend to excel in specific areas of life including poetry but not in male-dominated fields like chess or math. And third, those women who do make it into the annals of history as female child prodigies tend to have far more interesting lives than their male counterparts.

One woman that I’ve become interested in as I’ve studied female child prodigies is Sufiah Yusof. This chick was born in 1984 which makes her younger than I am but before I was in my senior year of high school, she had been accepted at Oxford University to study math. A female math child prodigy is an interesting and rare thing indeed.

However, things didn’t go so smoothly for Yusof once she was immersed in college. She became a runaway who gave up her studies in math for jobs in waitressing followed by work in prostitution. She got famous for awhile as the child prodigy who made it as a high-priced hooker and gave several interviews about how much she loved being a prostitute. Apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, she now regrets that time of her life and has returned to school and “respectable work” as a social worker.

I can’t tell you how fascinating I find all of this. And a lot of that fascination stems from the fact that I think it’s tough for smart women to make it in today’s society. Yes, there are many doors open to us that weren’t open to us before. But the social world for women remains different than it is for men. Our sexuality is tied to us no matter how much we’re praised for our smarts.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to enter college at the age of 13. When I was 13, my precocious intelligence was taking a back seat to an interest in pop music and a concern for how to make it navigate the walls of a tough junior high school. Dealing with entering puberty was tough enough around my peers; I can’t even imagine how it would have been if I’d been amongst college kids.

I think there are a lot of people out there who would judge someone like Sufiah Yusof for the choices that she made. But I wonder, did she really have much choice? Propelled into an adult world before she was emotionally mature enough to handle it, is it really any wonder that this female child prodigy ended up where she did. And for that matter, is where she ended up really so bad in the end? Truly smart people use their smarts to figure themselves out and then to help others and that sounds like exactly what this woman is doing.

Tags: child prodigy, child prodigy prostitute, hub pages, kathryn vercillo, prodigies, prostitution, smart women, sufiah yusof, women, women in society

One of the things that has become really important to me in the last year or so is the great friendships that I have with other women. I’ve always had female friends around me but I wasn’t always good at truly developing a close connection with the other women in my life. I feel like that is changing as I get older and I think that part of the reason that it is changing is because I am more and more capable of being a good friend to other women as I get to know myself and become more comfortable with myself.

How I’m approaching my female friendships and working on improving them can be explored a little bit in today’s article on How to be a Great Friend to Other Women. In that article, I focus on a few key things that we as women can do to make sure that we are being the kind of female friends that we want other women to be for us.

Would love to know your thoughts on female friendships and how to make them better!

Tags: be a good friend, female friends, friendships, life, people, Relationships, women

March means springtime and springtime means all kinds of different parties, doesn’t it? I don’t get the chance to go to too many baby showers but I did have the opportunity to do some research into them this morning. Specifically I got the chance to write about baby shower games.

What I love most about my women friends is how creative they all are. We have a lot of fun together because everyone in our group has great ideas. And yet we’re collaborative so we work together to make those ideas happen in a non-competitive way.

Baby shower games are an example of this. Of course, the hostess of the baby shower is the one who picks the games that are going to be played but the women who participate have to add their own creativity and sense of fun to the experience for everyone to have a good time.

Whether you’re pinning the pacifier on the baby, passing the dirty diaper or turning baby food into delicious adult treats, you’re probably having fun at a baby shower. Games aren’t all that a baby shower is about, of course, but they sure do make the baby shower fun.

Tags: baby shower, creativity, Friends, fun, games, Parenting, parties, party games, party planning, play, pregnancy, social life, women