It's Left...It's Right...

I had a bizarre revelation today about my desktop icons...I seriously think the antibiotic/steroid combo is whacking my brain out (took the last of that today!), but whatever...you now get to benefit from my insight...yes, I'm calling it insight.

I glanced at my desktop at work today, a PC, and recognized that I keep all my shortcut icons on the left. I try to keep them to a minimum, because too many icons just send me over the edge, but there they are...on the left. And then I thought, "Hmmm...you know, on my Mac at home, all the icons are on the right." And then I just sat there for a minute and thought about why that might be. Because it's been that way forever. It's not new. I just never really noticed that I did it differently between work and home, PC and Mac. Then I started thinking about how I actually sit and work.

At work, I'm docked and have the full monitor, keyboard, mouse thing going on, so my right hand is typically on the mouse doing things. At home, I'm all laptop, so my hands are used more equally. They both "mouse", if you will, on the trackpad. Then I thought about what it is I'm doing at work as opposed to what I do at home. Duh. I work at work and I do more play at home - there's certainly work at home too, but it's more play, more creative. Then I thought, "Hmmm...left brain? right brain?" And then I found this great graphic on the web - thank you Internets. You rule.

And really...there it is. Left is really all about work (at least the work I do) and right is really all about the more creative, the stuff I tend to do at home. OMG. It's so crystal clear it almost made both sides of my brain do a dance inside my skull. How crazy that such a little thing could delineate my life so clearly!

So, after finding this most yay graphic, I was determined to write about it when I got home. Then, when I sat down here a few minutes ago, on my right-brained Mac, all that popped into my head was Michael Jackson's Black or White. And you could see how I got there...It's black, it's white..It's left, it's right...but then I got to thinking about songs that actually use the whole left right thing...it's really quite a popular song subject...

So here we go...add your own in the comments if you have a favorite! Because you know, that's fun for everyone!!

• We've got the classic left/right song, the Hokey Pokey. It's pure left and right joy. Put the right this in, then put it out; put the left this in, then put it out; shake it, do the Hokey Pokey, etc....it is, after all, what it's all about.
• The Fray tell us that "he goes left and you stay right" in their classic, How to Save a Life.
• Beyonce puts "everything you own in the box to the left" in her, um, classic? tune, To the Left.
• Bon Jovi's got an album called "This Left Feels Right" (could that BE more confusing?).
• The ever-popular Stealers Wheel jam "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right" reminds us that most of us are really Stuck in the Middle.
• Even Jimmy Buffet talks about "fins to the left, fins to the right" in a tune called, well, Fins...which I can only hope is really about the Sharks swarming the Blackhawks in their next game...but I digress...
• And of course the US Armed Forces have given us the always peppy "Your left, your left, your left, right left" chant.

I guess my point is, at the end of the day, it many times just comes down to left or right. Are you left brained or right brained? Did you turn left or right? Are you left or right handed? Do you have a box on the left? Did you push the button on the right?

And still...Michael Jackson sings in my head...and now he shall sing in yours...