AAAAYYYYYYIIIIIEEEEE!!! (Stabs elfkin477 with left-handed dagger) Sorry! I wasn’t in my “right” mind. 
Uhm, Tupug, if you were using your left hand you do realize, don’t you…
um…never mind.
Another leftie here! I have a nice snappy cable connection on my computer that sometimes friends and family come over to use, and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been hovering over their shoulders, saying “left handed mouse! Left handed mouse!” at them.
Of course, I could be nice and move the mouse and reprogram the buttons, but fuck 'em, let 'em live in my world for a while
What, I’m a cat so I can’t be left handed? Yes I can! Of course, I’m also fictional, which is the bigger problem.
I guess I missed this thread the first time around, so bounce…
being left-handed has been difficult in my life. It seems like I have been exposed to so many of the left/right handed issues that come up. Now, I have always written left handed (I can’t even write my name with my right hand), but I am slowly starting to do more and more things left handed. I was brought up learning to swing a baseball bat left handed, and then my parents decided to surprise me with a golf club set for my 12th birthday…which was also righthanded. Fortunately I always bought my own hockey equipment so I learned that sport left handed, and I’ve always been much better at it than baseball or golf, go figure.
I grew out of my sports phase by high school, but am still a well-rounded musician. I guess there really isn’t anything I can do about being forced to play melodic lines on a keyboard with my right hand (after 17 years, switching to a reversed keyboard…if such thing exists, would be hard anyway), but I’ve had to deal with being surrounded by righthanded guitars in my home (I’m the only lefty in the family)…which I was never very good at learning. Just last week, I decided it was about time I really learned to play guitar, and I decided I was gonna stop screwing around and get myself a proper lefty guitar. Well, it’s much harder than it seems. Most of the guitar places I went to in the area have a very small stock of lefty guitars, and the ones they DO have are marked up to 30% higher than the righty version. I finally went online and bought a $90 lefty guitar…I decided I wasn’t gone pay a 30% penalty to play guitar until I was sure that it was gonna get some use, so in the meantime I have a cheap one to mess around with.
Being left handed can suck at times, but it’s always a great conversation piece, except with those who assume they need to speak louder for me to understand them
fusoya, you ought to be able to get a normal righty guitar and make it lefty simply by reversing the angle of the bridge and putting the strings on in reverse order. Any music shop that wouldn’t do this for a minimal price are a bunch of jerks.
I myself am what I like to call a “latent lefty.” The reason for the expression is that I heard sometime last year that there are apparently dominant genes for right-handedness, but none at all for left handedness. People born without these genes can go either way, simply by force of habit (which is established early in life, so training someone out of it is not possible, sorry), often based on observations as very small children. I don’t know if it’s true, but I suspect that, if it is, I’m one of those people born without those genes. I use my right hand for everyday mundane tasks like writing and mousing, but I’m actually fairly ambidextrous, often with very random activities. I can do heavy work like shoveling however it suits me, and I throw a frisbee and use a hockey stick left-handed. However, I golf and swing a baseball bat righty. Oddly enough though, I kick a ball with my left foot. I think this has to do with me simply watching and learning to use my right hand for most activities, which solidified using my right hand as a habit for everyday activities.
Hmmm, I’m also right-eye dominant. I’m just one messed up individual!
Geeez! Besides being whiney, it seems like lefties can’t take a joke either.
[sub] of course, being a leftie, I would know [/sub]
Yes, they could do that, but to complete the job they would also have to move the knobs and tremolo bar to the other side, and then reattach the guitar strap to the other side, and with most guitars, you can’t just simply reverse the pickguard to the other side, or easily change where the cable plugs in. I HAVE tried making a righty guitar into a lefty before, and it just isn’t the same. It’s technically playable, but the feel of it is very distracting. Plus it just looks totally wrong, unless you happen to be Jimi Hendrix, which I’m not (I’m a big fan of They Might Be Giants, and in many of their old music videos, their guitarist John Flansburgh is playing right handed guitars upsidedown and it looks like some kind of comic effect rather than serious playing). I still think that, despite having to make different molds, charging an extra 20%-30% for lefthanded guitars is an act of discrimination. Does the constitution have special rights (pardon the pun) for left-handers? Is it any different than charging separate prices for gay and straight newspaper listings, or for men and women’s haircuts (that’s the best example I could think of right now…)
I am left-handed. So is my wife, and so are both my kids. I have yet to meet a rightie who doesn’t boggle when I tell them that. They seem to think my whole family is violating a law of nature.
BTW, there is one and only one thing that I do for which my right hand becomes dominant. That’s playing piano. Probably because I was given piano lessons starting at a very early age and, well, if the music is written so that it favors the right hand, there ain’t just a whole lot you can do about it.
It is so good to be counted among such company as this!
I can recall regularly buying left-handed notebooks for school from a specialty shop in Pittsburgh (no, not Ned Flanders’ “Leftorium”–snicker). They were spiral bound with the spiral on the right side. Ingenious, I say!
I can also recall my cursive handwriting teacher being thoroughly flummuxed as to how to teach me to write. I hated being the only kid in second grade with her paper tilted an at obscene angle.
And, while we’re on the subject, I hated being the only kid who had to use the crappy dull scissors with the green “tard” handles (not my own label, folks–gen-u-ine second grade lingo, here). Sometimes I’d try and go covert righty and grab the nice shiny silver scissors out of the coffee can during art class, but the teacher always made me put them back and grab the green ones! Horrors!
Now I am the proud mother of a lefty, and I fully intend to teach him the pride of his heritage.
Wow, thank you for opening the wounds of one of the most tramourtizing moments of my childhood. My elementary school too had the green-tard LEFTY scissors which were 40 years old, meanwhile everyone else had new shiny scissors. I had enough with it, and always took the righty ones, and when my teacher (this mean 70 year old hag) noticed, I’d get in trouble. She apparently thought I would break them if I used them with my left hand. Ugh…scissor using is one of those OTHER things I just adjusted to in life. Still can’t use the canopener though…
Heheheheheh
The GREEN handled scissors. We had a special tin for our Leftie scissors and they were new and sharp and not gummy with glue and age old projects.
There were 7 lefties in my kindergarten class. We had our names up on a big piece of chart paper above the craft supplies, and the fancy painted green coffee can. We felt like we were the chosen people.
Years later I met a woman who went to the same kindergarten the previous year and then was pulled from the school. Apparently she had been discriminated against, partly because she had poor vision and was lefthanded. Allegedly this teacher called her stupid, complained about how she couldnt cut simple shapes out, had messy scrawling printing…
(this was in the early 70’s…!) Her mother and some others raised hell before they left though.
So I think I reaped some benefits, some belated lefty affirmative action.