It wasn't the kind of ingrown hair that knows its confused and grows into a tight little spiral, having obviously been doing its best to find its way out—the kind that sort of sproings out of your skin triumphantly, being just as pleased as you are to have finally corrected its course.
No, it wasn't that kind of ingrown hair. It wasn't sensible.
This particular ingrown hair was an ingrown hair that was suffering severely from the Dunning-Kruger effect, a "cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people [or hairs] with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of their ability."
Yes, this ingrown hair put undue confidence in its non-existent navigational skills. It was forging its own path, certain it was doing A+ work when really it was failing abysmally at the one job it has.
This hair had grown about an inch long in a relatively straight line just under my skin...which rather explained the constant itching of my ankle that I hadn't been able to satisfy in recent history.
So I took a pin and punctured my skin, looped the hair up, and tugged it out with tweezers.
As one does.
It was very satisfying.
So I had to tell Andrew all about it when he came home and naturally had a rather nosy audience of bystanders (read: children) listen in as I related this tale.
This raised some questions about what, precisely, an ingrown hair is. Before we could even explain it, though, Alexander said as if he had solved a great mystery, "Ah-ha! So that explains why I sometimes get hairs in my mouth."
We quickly disavowed him of that notion (that any hairs he found in his mouth were simply ingrown hairs from the top of his head that decided to sprout in his mouth instead of into the sunshine) and explained what ingrown hairs actually are. But...that's a pretty funny thought!
No comments:
Post a Comment