By Mordechai Schmutter
Whenever people realize I’m a lefty, they always feel the need to mention someone else they know who’s a lefty, like we might know each other. Like there’s some kind of club. Lefties only. The doors open the wrong way, the pencil sharpeners are backwards, they have a self-serve ice-cream bar with scoops we can press with our thumbs instead of our pinkies, we can all arm-wrestle fairly, and we don’t have a hard time finding someone to borrow tefillin from.
But there’s no club. Probably because we have no money.
Yes, according to a study at Harvard, lefties make less money per year than righties.
Well, that explains it. I thought it was because I was a writer and a teacher.
But what about my wife? She’s a righty. Why don’t we have more money because of her? Well, it turns out that women make less money too. So if you marry a woman who’s also a lefty, you should be prepared to win all the bread. And also peel all the potatoes.
Though I wouldn’t put too much stock in these studies. For example, there’s a study that lefties drink more, but I barely drink at all. Where am I going to drink? There’s no club. Yes, there are health clubs, where the machines have most of the important buttons on the right, such as the button that stops the treadmill when you’re tired. I have to just fall over and yank out the dead-man’s switch.
But it could be true if there’s a real reason behind it. So why don’t we get the higher-paying jobs? I guess one reason could be the job interview, when we walk up to the interviewer, right off the bat, and attempt to shake his left hand.
Every lefty knows there are disadvantages. For example, I cannot use a dry-erase board. If I’m not careful, I take the words off as fast as I write them. This may not seem like a major deal to you, but I’m a teacher. Though I imagine limudei kodesh teachers have the same problem writing Hebrew on the board, so they have my sympathies. I should have been a rebbe. Or maybe I should teach my subject in Hebrew. (My subject is English grammar.)
I’ve also never been able to do anything cool with a pair of scissors. My wife helps the kids with their fair projects, because those are meant for the parents, and she cuts pictures out of magazines, and even cuts alef-beis shapes. Meanwhile, I always go too far and snip an entire leg off the alef. If you look at anything I cut, you’ll find random jagged edges where it looks like I started cutting in one direction and then I changed my mind.
But most things aren’t as inconvenient as people make them sound. Yes, it’s harder to use a mouse with my left hand, especially when it’s sitting to the right of the keyboard, so I use it with my right. My mother-in-law, who’s also a lefty, sometimes uses a lefty mouse, but I can’t even use hers. I just learned from the outset to use a mouse with my right hand. The upside, though, is I can use my mouse and eat at the same time, which I do a lot of.
Also, if you fan out playing cards with your left hand, you can’t see the numbers. So I do that with my right. Yes, I can buy left-handed playing cards for more money, but who am I going to play with? All the righties in my house? My mother-in-law?
Maybe I can pull it out at the lefties club.
So all in all, I would say lefties are more adaptable. Yet all the articles I keep reading assume that we’ve been living on a planet of lefties and are just now crawling out into society. I know I’m supposed to shake people’s right hands. I’ve done it. I have an advantage, because I don’t even have to stop eating to do so. (Most of my advantages, apparently, involve not having to stop eating. Maybe that’s why we’re not getting jobs.)
And we’re not offended by expressions either. There are tons of expressions that put the right hand in a more positive light. For example, a partner in crime is called a “right-hand man,” because if he was a left-hand man, you couldn’t trust him. If he’s right, you can, other than the fact that he’s a criminal. And in Ghana, saying that someone “slept on his left side” is a euphemism for death. (In Jewish lingo, it’s a euphemism for 1/60th of death, and it comes highly recommended.)
Another inconvenience is that, according to studies, lefties live an average of nine years less than righties. Probably because of scissors. Life’s too short to spend cutting paper correctly. Another reason we die sooner, I’m guessing, is accidentally drinking from someone else’s glass at the dinner table.
Which brings us to another historic inconvenience—the Battle of Elbows. I bump elbows with people at meals all the time, which might explain why the elbows on my shirts wear out so fast. I kind of have to link elbows like I’m helping an old lady across the street, and that makes people uncomfortable.
Not to mention that basically all the cup holders in my car are on the right side. I have one on the left, and it’s in front of the heating vent, so it keeps my soda warm. So maybe we’re dying early from dehydration. Or hot soda.
And most of the controls are on the right side too. I have to either awkwardly adjust everything in the car with my right hand while driving, or do it even more awkwardly with my left. So in general, most of the controls are adjusted once—before I start driving. I turn on the heat right when I get into the car, and if at some point it gets too hot, I roll down the windows, because those controls are on the left, and I heat up the world. I guess I would also have an easier time paying tolls, except that I have E‑ZPass anyway. Maybe I should move to England and write in Hebrew.
It’s not as bad as it used to be. One big disadvantage of being a lefty used to be that teachers would beat you for it, probably using a ruler designed for right-handed people. Because to me, the numbers are upside down, or I have to start at the 12 and measure backwards. Also, I like using clear measuring cups, because otherwise I can never read the lines without turning them around. I have to read them through the cup. Also, the writing on every pen is upside down, we have to hold our watches upside down when we change the time, we fan through magazines backwards, and don’t even get me started on e‑books.
So no wonder we make less money; we’re less efficient at operating the world. While right-handed architects are hard at work planning their buildings, we’re still trying to figure out if the wall is 6 feet or 9 feet.
But I guess we’ve gotten good at reading upside down, which is convenient, especially when we’re learning with a chavrusa and we have one Gemara.
In fact, there are many advantages. Five of the last seven presidents were lefties, which means that if you’re a lefty, you’re more likely to be president. It’s just simple math.
(Another downside is that we’re worse at math.)
They also say that lefties might be better at multitasking, because whereas righties process stimuli with the left side of their brain, lefties do it with both. So lefties, they say, can talk and drive at the same time. I do that all the time when my wife is in the car, and we’re extremely safe, except that I tend to get lost more. My wife thinks that it’s not that I get lost more when she’s in the car, it’s that she doesn’t always find out about it when she’s not. And then I tell her to be quiet, because now we’re even more lost.
On the other hand, they say, because the minds of lefties are split, they’re more likely to go insane. And I do talk to myself a lot. But why not? I’m a great listener, despite what my wife claims.
Another advantage is that we lefties buy mugs with funny slogans that only we get to read. Maybe that’s why people think we’re insane, sipping our coffee by ourselves and laughing hysterically. Especially since no one sits near us. They sit across from us, and we sit across from them and read their newspapers.
Save us the job ads.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of four books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com.