2009-2-21, Dublin, Republic of Ireland
My shoes have been untied for four weeks. I’ve broken glasses, dropped food, and spilled many beverages. This one-handed life is a constant struggle against a world that you never realized was so dominated by things with the size, shape, and mechanics of two-handed use.
I beg you, please, do not use the term “single-handedly” without proper respect for how tricky single-handedness really is. Next time you cut bread, peel an orange, open a twist-top bottle, button your jeans, or zip up your jacket, have a go with just one hand. If you give up quickly, consider this: suddenly finding yourself needing to relearn simple tasks is more than anything an exercise in judging your own limitations. Should you not have wimped out and kept trying? Or is doing something one-handed when you don’t need to a ridiculous waste of your time that you shouldn’t have bothered trying anyway?
My natural response to a challenge is to try stubbornly until I succeed or until I become absolutely convinced I can’t do it. This is often good; by now I can single-handedly button things, zip things, eat and drink things, and open, close, and pack things without much thought because I took the time to make myself learn – even when help was offered. But then there were all those times that I struggled with something obscenely long until some nearby person got tired of watching me, and did it for me in about 20 seconds. The skill I’ve needed most to learn has been asking for help, and I’m still somewhat lacking in that regard. This can have disastrous consequences, too. Like the time I tried to open a yogurt drink at the train station in Paris with my teeth, resulting in yogurt all over my bag, jacket, and pants, not to mention the table and the ground, leading me to get yelled at by a waitress and causing me to miss my train to London by less than a minute. (But don’t let me talk it up too much – they got me on an express train 15 minutes later and I arrived at about the same time anyway.)
Assuming my lame stumbling around Europe hasn’t kept the bone from healing too much, I should be out of this sling in about two weeks. In the meantime, I’ve pretty well adapted. I can even just about touch type one-handed now, and on an AZERTY keyboard, no less! Most importantly, I’ve come to almost enjoy the confused looks of people trying to figure out whether I’m a guy with his arm in a sling under his shirt or an amputee with a big, funny-shaped belly, while they all the while pretend not to stare.
Incidentally, I’m in Dublin for the night because I found a cheap flight on Aer Lingus to SFO, but it had a terrible overnight layover. Then I found an even cheaper first leg from Amsterdam to Dublin, and the difference more than covered the price of a hostel bed and an evening bemoaning my woes over pints of Guinness. Which, by the way, really is as better here as they say it is.