So, I couldn't help but notice that you were writing with your left hand. When did you decide to become left-handed, just out of curiosity? And why--I mean, with the way society works and all, there are so many tools designed for right-handed people, and I can't imagine why you'd want to put yourself at a disadvantage like that.

You know, they didn't used to let people like you just run free, using whichever hand they wanted. They'd make you write with your right hand whether you wanted to be stubborn about it or not, and if they did it for so long there has to be a reason behind it. It's a tradition that has to be protected, if you ask me; it's just not proper writing if you're not using the correct hand. There has to be a good reason behind the meaning of the word sinister, and I think they're up to no good. It seems like in the past fifty years there's been an explosion in the number of lefties, and it's probably all due to them softening up and letting them practice that strange behavior unchecked. It's going to destroy the fine tradition of writing if we let them keep at it!

But I still don't understand why you'd ever want to do that. Write with the wrong hand and all. Frankly it seems a little unnatural to me; I can't imagine not using my right hand, can't see why you'd ever want to do it. My god, how awkward! It's not like you don't have a choice, like you can't just pick up a pencil with your right hand and write like that. Nothing's physically stopping you, so why should we let you pervert our writing system if you can just write normally like everyone else? Yes, that's right, you're just doing it to be perverse, it can't have any biological root whatsoever. They haven't isolated a lefty gene yet, have they? Unless you can prove it's genetic, it's a choice and you should change it.

And don't give me that crap about one in ten people being left-handed. That's just an overinflated statistic to make us think you're everywhere. Get back in line and use your right hand, and if your handwriting sucks it's your own fault for turning away from the right way to do things in the first place.

Christ, what's next? Lefty pride parades?

I'll start this right off by saying that I'm sort of cheating, since I chose ambidexterity rather than actually switching to my left hand, but I figure it still counds as the counterpart to bisexuality rather than homosexuality.

In any case, I don't remember how old I was when I made the decision -- most of my childhood memories can only be dated by pinning them down with a piece of then-new pop culture connected to the memory in question -- but my best guess is around ten. I do distinctly recall where I was, though; I was sitting in the backseat of our family car, a rather nondescript early-2000s Mazda Protegé, and on the sketchpad (technically a clipboard with blank paper clipped to it, but same idea) I carried everywhere, I wrote the alphabet -- both uppercase and lowercase -- in the shaky, wobbly printing of a child half my age or less and doodled a few simple pictures with my left hand.

Although I swiftly grew bored of doing so with any kind of dedication, the beauty of the idea of training myself to be ambidextrous is that it's not something that needs a lot of time or effort. All I had to do was, whenever I noticed that it was handedness-dependent and it wouldn't cause much of a setback to do so, switch tasks I typically performed with my right hand to my left hand, or alternate hands for those that required both: eating with cutlery, opening doors, use of a mouse, wiping with toilet paper, the list goes on. After all, it seemed to me more a matter of building manual dexterity and getting accustomed to my hands being interchangeable than any inherent property of my right hand.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, at the time, I don't actually think I had any reason besides "why not". However, the most practical justification I can come up with is that, in the event that I lose the use of my dominant hand (either temporarily or permanently) for some reason, it would be tremendously useful to be ready to go with my left; being capable of performing any manual task with either hand also adds more flexibility to my life even outside of such a scenario. I don't really have the coordination to do so yet, but being able to do two one-handed tasks at the same time would be useful as well. And, finally, getting into the realm of more emotionally-based reasoning, I'm a lifelong xenophile and thus find doing things left-handed to be kind of neat.