“Are you left-brained or right-brained?”
This is one of those things that people feel a remarkable freedom to ask within the first five minutes of getting acquainted. You are supposed to know, and there’s no equivocating allowed. It’s like being asked whether you’re Republican or Democrat: as an adult, you are assumed to have already picked a team. To blush and mumble “I don’t know,” or “I forget,” is cause for sideways glances and a quick re-shuffling of the cocktail party conversation groupings.
It doesn’t look good.
I verbalize the big picture.
Leaps of logic are fun play toys, yet I absolutely, positively, and in every conceivable way on this and every other planet STINK at filling out online forms. It’s the lurking ambiguity in the questions that undoes me. There are just too many possible ways to interpret the intention of what’s being asked.
It always ends in Rick rescuing me with gentle reassurance that it will all be okay, and no… drooping mascara, a runny nose and hiccups don’t make me look fat.
Even the “which way does your hemispheric boat float?” quizzes don’t help me. They involve questions such as:
- Do you have a place for everything and keep everything in its place? Yes or no?
See, they don’t provide the only answer which works for me: eventually.
- Can you tell approximately how much time passed without a watch? Yes or no?
I can hardly tell how much time has passed WITH a watch. One state line and a shift in daylight savings time, and I’m left faking it for six months until my clocks are all miraculously correct again.
- Speaking in strictly relative terms, is it easier for you to understand algebra or geometry?
Let me tell you, speaking in strictly relative terms, it’s easier for me to understand who my aunts and uncles are than who my second-cousin, once removed, might be. Besides, I don’t do math: too much ambiguity in the questions.
Besides, why do we have to pick? Don’t we need the whole magilla engaged, most of the time? It’s like asking, “When driving at 75 mph, do you keep your eyes open or your hands on the steering wheel?”
I took the quiz and scored 12 “righties” and 6 “lefties.” So the next time someone asks, I”m going with “I’m a mildly loquacious liberal independent ‘big thinker’ with an aversion to being pinned down by online forms and boorish conversation partners.”
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