Lefties Unite

[Daddio]

Who else out there is a lefty? Kudos to fellow lefty Randy Johnson’s perfect game last night!

How has being left-handed impacted your life both negatively or positively?

I do everything left handed except play guitar and golf. I bought my first guitar at a garage sale for $5 and the widow lady across the street gave me her husbands golf clubs after he died (I used to mow their lawn). So those two things I learned to do right handed at a young age.

As lefties, we are right brained, so that means that we should be more artistic, more creative but also more logical thinking and business minded. We tend not to like math or numbers or chemistry but excel in literature, science and the arts.

We are also statistically more likely to be involved in accidents, have serious injuries caused by machinery and power tools and to top it all off – we tend to die at a younger age (no doubt as a result of all those accidents and power tool mishaps).

Any lefty will tell you it impacts our lives somewhat both good and bad, I recall how the coach of the high school baseball team hunted me down freshman year to play on the varsity squad – where I was always one of only two or three total lefties on the team. So kids that may have been better players than me stayed on the Freshman/Sophomore teams but I was varsity all 4 years – mainly because I was left-handed.

And I want to scream every time I pay by credit card and am asked to sign that little screen with the stylus pen attached to a chain/cable that isn’t long enough to reach over the screen for a lefty to use.

I also think I never once turned in a homework assignment that looked neat as I drag my hand through the fresh ink of everything I have ever written in pen.

Did any of you have anyone trying and change you to the “right way” as a kid? (nuns at Catholic school were famous for this practice).

Do you ever find yourself watching TV or a movie and saying “Hey, he/she is a lefty” and did you ever notice how many celebrities are left-handed? It seems a relatively high number are and this could be as a result of the “right brained” thing.

[eldee]

Very interesting. I'm a rightie though.

[John]

I'm mostly a lefty. I write, eat, shoot pool, and fire a gun left-handed. Pretty much everything else (golf, baseball, etc.) I do right-handed.

[Lucy]

For some reason I saw the title of this thread and thought it was about politics. I guess that would be leftist, though. I've got to get out more.

[MalibuPam]

I'm a righty, but 2 of my 4 kids are lefties, and I swear my husband is truly a lefty but was "changed" in Catholic grade school. My husband is quite suspiciously ambidextrous in all ways. I've scolded him, too, when it comes to sports with the kids, because he always encourages the older lefty to learn right handed, most recently with baseball mitts and batting. I almost won that, except the boy himself insisted to me that he is "right-handed in sports" and was more comfortable that way. I don't see how, but I can't force the kid to do things left handed if he doesn't want to. My youngest lefty is about to start K, so she has no issues yet.

In school, my oldest little lefty did have one problem. His writing was always very very VERY messy (for instance, 1st or K style writing at 4th grade), and I made excuses that all the lefties I know had messy writing, so it was just taking him time to learn and he'd get better. It turns out, now at the end of 4th grade, that it was never about being a lefty at all. He has a little known neurological issue, a learning disability of sorts, called Dysgraphia. It is similar to how dyslexics don't see the words right on the page, only my dysgraphic can't write correctly because he has no muscle memory for writing letters. In other words, he reinvents the letter each time he writes it. I've been told that I caught this relatively early, because many children live through it, failing classes for years, without realizing there is a reason they have so much trouble writing. If he had been right handed, I think I would have looked for other reasons that he was so messy, much sooner. He is doing well now, though. He uses a laptop in school for everything because he is an excellent typist, and he's cool because of it. We have a special program that even allows him to type math problems.

[AJane]

I'm not a lefty myself, but my grandmother was a *natural* lefty and was forced to learn to write right-handed in school (this was back in, oh, 1917 or thereabouts, of course), and ended up being ambidextrous - able to write with both hands, that is, which we kids thought was pretty cool.

[Paulie]

I'm almost exclusively left-handed. The only things I do righty are use scissors, throw a Frisbee, and fire a gun. Other than that, my right arm could probably be replaced by a flipper and it wouldn't affect my life all that much.

[Duxxy]

lefties are sinister I'm a trivia nerd

My daughter is a lefty, but she throws a ball right handed. My husband insists that she MUST be right handed but I disagree. She writes, cuts with scissors and eats left handed.. the ONLY thing she does right handed is throw that darned ball. It's good to know that all of you lefties do sometimes favour your right hand.

My dad was a leftie but an altercation with a ringer washer when he was 3 yrs old took most of his left hand from him. The nuns in school discouraged him from using what remained of his left hand for anything and he was re-taught to do everything with his right hand. His writing is atrocious!

[Shazzer]

I'm almost exclusively left-handed. The only things I do righty are use scissors, throw a Frisbee, and fire a gun. Other than that, my right arm could probably be replaced by a flipper and it wouldn't affect my life all that much.

I'm sure it would affect some things. Like your ability to snap your fingers, or clap your hands without going, "arf, arf, arf". Or your ability to juggle flaming torches or perform speed origami.

But it would be entertaining to see you flail about, balancing balls and things on your little wee flippered arm. Dang that you can't google, "man with flipper arms" and find any good images.

[Feifer]

I am a righty naturally. I do many thing with my left hand only. When I was 5 years old I got my first fingernail polish. I learned to polish my right hand with my left and wondered how many things I could do with my left hand that I normally did with my right. From kindergarten to third grade, whenever we ran out of righty scissors in class and all there were were lefties, I volunteered to use the lefties.

My mom broke her right arm twice as a teenager and had to learn how to write lefty to do her school work. Now she is ambidextrous. Her signature looks the same with her left as with her right. It is amazing.