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Left-Handed

As I type this blog, I am using both hands on the keyboard with an occasional move of my right hand to the mouse!

Wait! Why is the mouse on the right side of the keyboard? I am left-handed. Shouldn’t the mouse be on the left side of the keyboard so that I can easily use my left hand to maneuver the mouse?

I have been left-handed forever…..well, since birth anyway. And as a left-handed person, I have had to deal with issues from time to time. For example, when writing with a pen, I always end up with ink down the side of my left hand since that hand moves over the ink as I write. I have had to turn spiral-bound notebooks upside down so that my left hand does not rest on the spirals while I write . . . very uncomfortable. I have missed some of the cute pictures or sayings on coffee mugs because when I pick a mug up with my left hand, the pictures are on the side facing away from me!

If you can relate to some of these issues because you too are left-handed, then you are among the 10% of all people who use their left hand predominantly, and that puts you in a group with President Barack Obama, Bill Gates from Microsoft, and Oprah Winfrey, according to this article.

There are many truths and many myths about left-handed people. I am lucky that during the 1960’s when I was a grade-school student at Vincentian Institute in Albany, NY, the good Sisters of Mercy who were my teachers did not buy into the myth that left-handed people were evil and sinister (a word from the Latin sinistra meaning “left hand”), so unlike some, I was not forced to write with my right hand. I wonder how many of us here at Maria College are lefties?!

Check out some other truths and myths about left-handedness here.

Now, in terms of me using my right hand to move the computer mouse, knit, and hold a guitar: I can only attribute that to the right-handed people who taught me those activities!

How about you? Share your thoughts about being left-handed or right-handed!

Until next time…

 

Anne