Handedness (anecdotes )
Corsair
>>EXCUSE ME!!! Left handedness is NOT a degeneration, neither is it
>>purely genetic.
>>
>>Bloody Mundanes!
>>
>>
then mark e says:
>Well, it's a goddamn inconvenience anyway! Unless you never been
>smacked upside the head by a ruler-wielding nun for writing
>sinisterly?
>
>As for it not being purely genetic, it's true for about 90% of
>left-handedness that it's more likely due to a number of other causes,
>excess testosterone in-utero being the primary culprit, causing
>over-development of the right-brain, also likely to cause dyslexia,
>high math ability, etc. A quick r-o-t is whether you curl your hand
>when writing, curling ==left-brain lefthanded (birth "defect" 8>),
>no-curl == right-brain, lefthanded ("genetic"). And I got me
>gen-u-ine backup on these here facts from a friend of mine's sister
>who is a neurosurgeon at some Important Place like John's Hopkins
>here in the US, though It's a little hard to present her here in
>virtual space, unless you want I should forge a post from her 8>)
here's an oddity. i was strongly right handed all my life, incapable of
doing more than scrawling unrecognizable marks with my left hand. then
when i started cross dressing, and developed the GuyRouge persona, Guy was
lefthanded. 'he' still has a scrawling handwriting, but legible. 'he'
writes distinctly different than 'I' do. i use greek 'e', and typewriter
'a', and many other adornments and simplifications to the standard scripts;
GuyRouge eschews them in favor of heavily slanted round 'e' and 'a', two
stroke 'r' and other differences. 'he' also cares a lot more about his
penmanship than 'i' do. 'his' hand does curl when 'he' writes lefthanded,'
my' hand does not curl when 'i' write righthanded.
okay, i knew i was bizarre, but this is getting weird!
corsair/GuyRouge
sig of the week: "A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his
enemies."
-- Oscar Wilde
---------------------- cor...@camelot.com ------------------------
Paladin Science Fiction Group Adult Fiction:
P O Box 187 science fiction, fantasy
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Denise Tree
..[attributions deleted]..
+------
|here's an oddity. i was strongly right handed all my life, incapable of
|doing more than scrawling unrecognizable marks with my left hand. then
|when i started cross dressing, and developed the GuyRouge persona, Guy was
|lefthanded. 'he' still has a scrawling handwriting, but legible. 'he'
|writes distinctly different than 'I' do. i use greek 'e', and typewriter
|'a', and many other adornments and simplifications to the standard scripts;
|GuyRouge eschews them in favor of heavily slanted round 'e' and 'a', two
|stroke 'r' and other differences. 'he' also cares a lot more about his
|penmanship than 'i' do. 'his' hand does curl when 'he' writes lefthanded,'
|my' hand does not curl when 'i' write righthanded.
|
|okay, i knew i was bizarre, but this is getting weird!
+------
[Warning: sweeping generalization alert]
Some currently accepted notions about hemispheric lateralization, gender,
intelligence and prenatal endocrine exposure would explain this right
handily (oops!). Sex and gender dimorphism requires a kind of psycholog-
ical censure of "other sex" behavior... this is part of the post-natal
mechanism of gender acquisition. It is known that psychologically andro-
gynous and some biologically intersexed people have much higher than
average intelligence, possibly due to androgen exposure, but also attribu-
table to the increased use of that grey matter which most people subjugate
as being part of the "other" sex. So, in acknowledging GuyRouge, apparently
alive and well over there in the right hemisphere, you've also allowed "him"
to use "his" hand... the left.
There is a lot of scholarly literature on this stuff as well as some fairly
good popular books as well.
|corsair/GuyRouge
|
|sig of the week: "A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his
|enemies."
| -- Oscar Wilde
|
| ---------------------- cor...@camelot.com ------------------------
______________________________________________________________________
_______________ Denise Tree
________________________________tr...@cs.jhu.edu
_________________________________________.... . . . . . . .
.
.
*
STella
>doing more than scrawling unrecognizable marks with my left hand. then
>when i started cross dressing, and developed the GuyRouge persona, Guy was
>lefthanded. 'he' still has a scrawling handwriting, but legible. 'he'
>writes distinctly different than 'I' do. i use greek 'e', and typewriter
>'a', and many other adornments and simplifications to the standard scripts;
>GuyRouge eschews them in favor of heavily slanted round 'e' and 'a', two
>stroke 'r' and other differences. 'he' also cares a lot more about his
>penmanship than 'i' do.
Both Crowley and Wilson have suggested writing with the off hand as a
means of accessing often-submerged parts of oneself. When I was a
child, I discovered, after reading about Leonardo da Vinci, that I
could reach an altered state by writing mirror script, as well as by
writing/copying with my right hand.
For me, however, handwriting on either hand, and in either direction,
is mostly quite similar in terms of letterforms, though the left-hand script
(mirror or not) is more legible than right-hand. But then, I'm not
bringing forward another persona when I do it, but only taking "me"
(snicker) to other places.
The significant difference between righting and lefting, though, is
that, writing with my off hand, I form some letters as I did when I
was a child, rather than as I currently do. When I am trying to bring
up an issue I think is likely driven by one of the child-personas,
sometimes it helps to attempt to write to my adult self, using the
right hand. Dunno if this would work for someone who didn't spend
HOURS, as a small but obnoxious person, learning to take notes
bassackward, so that people who teased me for writing left-handed,
with the arm hooked around the page, would really have something to
bitch about. (Never did use mirror script on a test or anything, but
did keep my notebook, one semester (alas, before the housefire) in
mirror just for obnoxiosity's sake.)
> 'his' hand does curl when 'he' writes lefthanded,'
>my' hand does not curl when 'i' write righthanded.
My hand no longer curls when I write lefthanded, but did when I was a
child, before I figured out how to arch over the line I was writing,
and so avoid smears.
>okay, i knew i was bizarre, but this is getting weird!
Do what thou weird shall be the whole of the awe....
STella%thelem...@decwrl.dec.com Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian!
1016 E. El Camino Real, #302, Sunnyvale, CA 94087
Lothie
This is something I've been wondering about for the longest time.
For years and years I've had another person -- well, more than one, but
another MAIN person -- inside of me. A boy, about my own age, named
Lorendil. He's been my best friend, my confidant, my lover, my
scapegoat. He's always loved me, even when I couldn't believe anyone
else did.
A year ago or so, when my Master and I had a firmly established
relationship, Lorendil decided that he wanted out. Not out as in
leaving, but out as in being allowed to have his own life. This freaked
me out a little, but I felt that he had probably kept me sane and alive
for the last fifteen years or so, and so I tried to give him some
separate sense of self. I got him his own account so that he could IRC
and meet people on his own, and be taken seriously without having people
who knew us both always see him as me instead as of him.
Up till now, I've told only my lovers and one or two other friends about
this. I figured, who would take seriously a six-foot tall, slender,
well-hung MAN, given my five-foot-three, roundy, very clearly FEMALE
body? Not to mention my voice, and a whole lot of other things. What
would be the point?
But maybe it's okay after all, and Lorendil doesn't need to be my secret
anymore.
In a way, this doesn't relate to Denise's article. Lorendil is, like
me, right-handed. But in a lot of other ways, he's not like me. He is
calm and quiet, while I am volatile. He is more of a top than I am.
When he bottoms, he wants much more pain than I can stand. And his
sexual responses are *very* different from mine, as are many of his
expressions. On the other hand, we have a lot of similarities, as one
might expect from two people raised so closely together.
Lorendil pretty much only "comes out" with people that he truly trusts,
at least at this point. He has trouble talking, because he doesn't like
the way my voice sounds (he likes it fine as a voice, just not as HIS
voice). But every once in a while he'll pop out at unexpected moments.
Vision, if you're reading this, that was Lorendil brushing your hair
during Saturday afternoon at Disclave, and trying not to laugh out loud
when you were expressing a wish to meet him during the weekend.
Again, to relate this to the subject, Lorendil isn't left-handed, but he
*does* write much differently from the way I do. I think perhaps he
*might* have been left-handed if I had let him "out" a long time ago. I
don't think he'll change now, though.
Thanks, Corsair and Denise, for inspiring me to get up the guts to come
out about this. It's nice to know I'm not weird or something.
**Lothie, okay okay, I mean, not REALLY weird.
--
"Why a *spoon*, cousin?"
"Because it's *blunt*, you twit; it'll hurt *more*!"
The GOLAB: lot...@syrinx.umd.edu, wi....@n7kbt.rain.com
Sometimes I feel I have nuts, sometimes I don't.
averti
Anybody unclear as to why it's way more fun to have a Lothie in yer
life than not?
I am not sure I have ever met Lorendil (he might have peeked out once
or twice while I was otherwise occupied) but he sounds like a faceted
character, and a credit to the little round sexy body he shares 8).
a.