
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 14, 1991                   TAG: 9102140150
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IF THOSE PEOPLE HAD JUST HALF A BRAIN . . .

I hope it doesn't get into your personnel file - make that human resources file, I guess - but there is evidence that thinking with the right front of your brain is not likely to make people think of you as a whole lot of fun.

The New York Times reported that such jokers "shrink from encounters with people or situations and are easily fazed by setbacks."

I'm not telling you which side of my brain I think with, but I can tell you the above description kind of fits old yours truly here.

Listen, I've been known to shrink from small females selling Girl Scout cookies.

I don't know whether I do this for neurological or economic reasons, however.

I also shrink from situations.

These include a situation in which carpenter ants have eaten an eave out of the house.

Or the bathtub upstairs has been leaking since 1968, resulting in the destruction of the ceiling in the kitchen last Tuesday.

According to the Times, people with more brain activity in their left frontal cortexes are cheerful.

One of these types apparently would arrive home after being, as the military say these days, attrited from his job, and take such news cheerfully.

"What's that, Bianca? You say the carpenter ants have eaten the living room and are starting on the stairs? Ho. Ho. You have to admire those spunky little devils, what?"

People who use their brains like I do do not react this way.

I can't speak for the others, but I tend to tear my clothes, throw wood ashes in my hair and run screaming through the limited woodland at the back of the house.

And don't forget that business up there about right-front people being "easily fazed by setbacks."

That's me again.

The other morning, I failed to get the little brush into this stupid thing you are supposed to use to clean between your teeth to keep them from falling out.

It would take a brain surgeon's touch to get this tiny little wire through this tiny little hole in this weird handle.

A person who was using the right part of his or her brain would brush such failure off: "Tell you what, good buddy, a brain surgeon I ain't."

But it worried me for days. I thought of myself as an underachiever who would pay for being a thick-thumbed idiot by losing all of my teeth.

And they can put the above in my human resources file if they want to.

People who are as old as I am, no matter what part of the brain they use, don't care about things like that.

by CNB