CONFESSIONS

I intend this to be an ongoing admission of many embarrassing quirks (or outright LIES!) I have allowed myself to get away with for most of my life and would like to leave behind. It's time to go to Confession:

1).Trying to force myself to be ambidextrous.

Since the time that I was very young, I have always had a problem remembering the diff between left and right. Not because I couldn’t tell which side was which, but giving them names seemed …pointless. And I am a visual learner and unrecognized genius, so after a few months in 1^st grade of my parents going “Why don’t you get this, jackass?!” (I’m paraphrasing) I realized I was going to start having to fake it and fast or I would never get to be the next Jeanette (see: The Chipmunk Adventure). So telling my parents I used both interchangeably seemed a good way to convince them that my confusion was founded in some kind of harmless genius confusion.

Now, I will say this: I have always found it easy to switch between right and left for most tasks– teeth brushing, phone handling/dialing, juice drinking, peanut butter spreading – which is I think why I had a problem distinguishing between them early on because I had no reason to know which one I was using. Both my hands seemed so eager to help get the job done, I just let them take turns; I was always very fair.

But the one major exception to this was writing. It’s not that I can’t or couldn’t write with my left hand – in fact I’ve always been able to, but the cramped serial-killer scrawl that fills up the page (in addition to completely tiring me and my wrist the CRAP out) is just too scary to use unless it is an emergency. Like on the phone while peeling an orange and trying to beat your own score on Brick breaker. So you need to write out that phone number some annoying "friend" is giving you with your left hand. I’m not saying I’m ambidextrous, but … I do have the proclivity. It just gives me the feeling like, when you’re in a dream and you’re trying to run away from a huge horde of King Koupas and somehow Beebop & Rocksteady join the gang and they’re all chasing you down with maces and battleaxes with their 80’s punk flare and you can’t friggin get your body to run.

It’s like trying to get yourself together in a Bounce House. You just can’t do it – too much excitement, too much bubblegum flavored icing, too much blue drank (I don’t know quite what this is, but it always managed to be the beverage du jour at birthday parties I attended between 2^nd and 5^th grade, leaving a huge blue stain around everyone’s disgusting child lips), too much bouncing! And that is how I am with writing with my left hand. Other stuff – piece of cake (with bubblegum-flavored icing, please) but if I have to so much as write my own name, my whole wrist just panics. And within three minutes, I’m holding the pen so tight I have to consciously tell my thumb to relax, the Back Store.

The only way I’ve actually been able to get away with it, is when I’m taking notes that only I have to decipher at a later date. So in class, my wrist/thumb actually chill out enough to realize, hey, serious situation here involving grades and my future so no time to fart around and act like you’re too chicken to write a run-on sentence about this professor’s horrible description of right ascension & declination. Wrist-thumb pep talk. Wrumb-eptalk. (isn’t that a Star Trek character?) And that’s how I use my not-quite ambidextrousity. But I think I should stop telling people I’m ambidextrous. Because that auto-implies “Yes, I am Leonardo Davinci’s equal – tremble before my intellectual MIGHT!” and really…not the case. CONFESSION!

But if you need someone to open a jar for you or help you tie your shoelaces with their left hand…I’m just saying I could help. For $50 an hour. “Will work for Bounce House time.”