A male barber shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?

What’s wrong with using data? Nothing, but how do we know we’re using the right data?  In real life data needs to be seen as a flat, artificially boundried piece of a much larger, messier, multidimensional story. It’s a photograph that usually depicts the most easily captured and quantified piece of the story. Often enough, the most easily captured and quantified data is not be the most meaningful or useful.

It’s easy to get sidetracked. In this case, it turns out the barber in question is eight years old, and I know for a fact he’s got a pituitary problem that means he’ll never disconcert us with any sort of secondary sexual characteristics, so there we have it—problem solved.

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Some-one or two asked me why I don’t write about my kid these days and after some thought I concluded that it’s because I’m doing a pretty lousy job as a mother and feel ashamed. I am finally starting to understand the raging market for Bad Mother literature. It’s a lot easier to field critiques from nosy strangers than to endure the knowledge that you broke your child’s heart.

Confessing publicly is even nicer. Because, between the two of us, I am the only one who can write, I would tell a emotionally nuanced, apparently even-handed story, thrumming with just enough guilt and extenuating circumstances to make all the other mothers generously absolve me with it’s-no-big-deals and do all the hard work of rationalization on my behalf. Unfortunately the pre-rational person injured does not agree that it’s no big deal. Which leads me to cheerfully conclude: 1) It’s impossible to help another person with their pain and 2) we will all die alone. Then I stare into space for a while and think about how pregnancy must be the only time it’s A) possible to really protect someone you love and B) not be truly alone. At which point I wind up with that thought that it’s terribly sad and a great relief not to have any more children.