Happy Left-Handers Day – What Sucks About Being a Lefty?

Every left-hander who has ever written anything knows exactly what I'm talking about. As a lefty you drag the heel/palm of your had over paper as you write, leaving your hand with a nasty smudge of black ink or graphite on it (which usually ended up on my forehead or my shirt when I forgot it was there). To make matters even worse, it made your written work look all smudgy and dirty.

Pick-up games of baseball were rampant in my youth, but I always had to be extra-prepared. It seemed everyone with a large yard had a stack of baseball mitts laying around so us kids could play. But, none of them ever had a left-handed one. My options were either not play, or try and play with my glove on the wrong hand. Let's just say I got pretty good at catching with a right-hander's glove. And when I coach softball teams I always try to have an extra lefty mitt on-hand, just in case.

In my childhood (before computers), I had to rely on spiral notebooks for almost every class. Now, this one may seem nit-picky, but YOU try writing on a spiral notebook that has the spirals on the same side as your writing hand. You end up not using a third of the page and your hand gets lovely little spiral indents in it. Sure there were left hand ledgers, but they cost a lot more. Those were a couple of bucks each, while the "regular" notebooks were like 19 cents. Totally unfair.

When I grew up, there weren't lefty scissors (at least not where I shopped). Every time I had to cut things at school I had to fight my way through the paper with a pair of right-handed scissors on my left hand. It didn't help that most of my school's scissors couldn't cut paper even if did use your right hand, but let's just say I gave up on many art projects after trying (and failing) to cut out intricate shapes with wrong-handed Fiskars.

I'm fairly certain whoever decided wedding rings should be worn on the left ring-finger put them there to keep them out of the way when they used their right hands. I'm not a big "jewelry guy" to begin with, but I can't even count how many times I've clanked my ring against a glass, caught the edge of it on a door or injured someone with an over-zealous high five or fist bump. When your dominant hand has a big hunk of metal on it, bad things sometimes happen. I'm just sayin'...