The topic of sexual education makes me nuts, because kids are certainly not now and have rarely ever been "clueless" about what adults do and delude themselves about keeping from their kids. Especially now that so many of them are carrying the entire internet around in their pockets.

I believe in innocence until there's proof of guilt and all that.

Awkwardness is when there's a risk of a perception gap between what you mean and what you appear to mean.

The most reliable ways to make oneself miserable are attempting to change people and not attempting to change circumstances.

One helpful thing to keep in mind as a retort-stopper is that you won't "win," you won't change anyone's mind, you won't change any votes, you won't make the atmosphere in the room any better, YOU won't feel any better.

There has been, for some reason (or more likely an unfortunate accumulation of reasons) a trend over the past several decades for parents to do the work of parenting in the isolation of their own homes - and not only that, this trend has overlapped with the other trend of much deeper parent involvement in raising kids. That you also represent trend No. 3, more people raising kids solo, has only exacerbated a close-to-no-win situation.

I do crosswords when I have time to kill somewhere, and am 100 percent successful on filling in the spots I get stuck on - after I close up, do something else, and then go back to it.