Blog post Number 27 Written: 06-17-2021 Uploaded: 07-29-2022
I am left-handed, and just like right-handed people forget there are left-handed people, I forget there are right-handed people and it’s weird to watch a right-handed person write. It’s very different for a left-handed person, the spine of the book, for example, a spiral-bound notebook or a 3-ring binder, the spine of the book gets in the way of your hand so it’s hard to scribble on the pages. Some people just deal with it, when possible, I like to take the pages out of the book and write on them separately then put them back in the book. I know others who write in their books backwards, they still write on the pages from left to right, but they write on the last page of the book first and work their way towards the front of the book, so the last page they fill would be the first page. In theory that’s a nice solution, but my head doesn’t like it. After all, it is working backwards.
Another thing to be careful with is if writing quickly especially with nice gel pens, your hand will drag over the ink before it is dry, and smear the ink and get it all over your hand. The same applies with pencils, now obviously pencil lead doesn’t have to dry the way ink does, but if you are writing a longer length document your hand dragging over the graphite on the paper will eventually turn your hand gray, and if you have to write several pages, then by the time you are done, there will be enough on your hand that it deposits its own graphite on the page over the top of what you have written and it muddies the waters even further.
Those are just the immediate things too, there’s tons of little stuff with being left-handed that make life difficult, or at least minorly inconvenient in a right-handed person world. Like using scissors, or everyone putting the mouse on the wrong side of the keyboard. I’ll tell you what, the look of horror and confusion on someone’s face when you pick up a mouse and move it to the other side of the keyboard before you use it. Lots of other little things that don’t really immediately come to mind, like handles being on the wrong side of the door, handle being on the wrong side of the toilet, the flap that covers the zipper on your jeans on the wrong side, so you have to run the zipper up and down with your right hand and not your left.
Dealing with all this right-handed stuff, like pockets on the wrong side of the chest for your polo shirt, teaches us, left-handed people, how to be right-handed or kills you in the process, there are lots of workplace injuries or deaths from left-handed people using right-handed equipment. So, I think there are two kinds of people and none of them are left-handed. There are right-handed people and ambidextrous people.
I enjoy being left-handed, it helps me be weird, it’s another quirk thing that helps me be the weird author I am. I would like to also mention that having worked in the aviation industry for over six years, there is a higher-than-average percentage of left-handed people working on airplanes. Statistically, 1 in eleven people is left-handed, but working on airplanes it seems closer to 40% of the people are left-handed and it’s a nice extra bit of comraderies around the hangar.
Chace Randolph 