Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

A nice thing from this morning Breakfast on R3 in the shape of the gigue from the fifth of Bach's French Suites. They went with Anderszewski playing just the last movement but I can't resist András Schiff playing the entire suite:



With the office very noisy today — I now know far more than I really want to about the dental health of someone on the other side of the aisle — and with it being delivery day, I goofed off and went downstairs where I helped to prep some of the cables.

While I was down there, Sonja showed me a neat trick: how to write with both hands at the same time. When she did it, she reversed the writing in one direction, but when I did it, I wrote the same way with each hand. I suspect it may be because I write equally well — or, more honestly, equally badly — with either hand and being able to write backwards with one hand isn't really all that useful...

In Chapter 13 of the Sandman Companion, Hy Bender prefaces the discussion on inspiration with the following allegory:

There's a fable about a bird being asked which wing he lifts first when he's about to take off from the ground; and the bird, who's never given the process a thought, becomes so self-conscious that he loses the ability to fly.

I feel a bit like the bird at the moment. Thanks to the simplest, most trivial, most innocent comment, my entire world has been thrown into disarray to the point where I'm almost completely unable to carry out the most basic manual tasks. What could possibly have caused this catastrophe? Someone pointed out to me that I used the wrong hand to enter numbers into keypads.

Suddenly I've become acutely conscious of the fact that I switch hands from left to right and back with no apparent rhyme or reason for the change. I've started to worry that somewhere along the line, my attempts to analyse the situation have broken some fundamental part of my brain that deals with handedness. I'm concerned that, now that I've noticed the problem, I'm never again going to be able to return to my previous, happy, delusion of being right handed.

The more I think about it, the more bereft I feel. As though someone has taken away one of my fundamental certainties...