Steve Harvey, I have received the encrypted messages you've been sending me

With my left hand, I use the plastic tongs to grab a cookie and put it on my little plate. 

“Are you right-handed?” says a woman from just out of view.

I turn to look. I’ve never seen her before. “I’m sorry, what?” 

“Well I thought maybe you were right-handed and you were just showing off.” 

I am left-handed, but in a cool way. I don’t talk about it much and I refuse to subscribe to any of those commonly held ideas that lefties are somehow smarter, more creative, or more anything except maybe more incompatible with common product design. 

A few years ago I was dining with a guy who worked for me in the beautifully appointed garden of an Italian restaurant in Chicago. This was our first time meeting in person, and as soon as I sat down he clocked me. 

“You’re left-handed.” 

I was nearly as shocked by the speed and accuracy of his observation as I was by his decision later to order an after-dinner Sprite– apparently a common practice of his.

Where the guy at the Italian restaurant processed the fact of my handedness and regurgitated it quickly into an impressive remark, the woman at the tongs-and-cookies party did another thing entirely: she observed something unremarkable, and in seconds synthesized it into an implausible, borderline paranoid scenario. 

But what if she was right? 

What if the only reason anyone does anything, is to flex on you, specifically?

What if I’m not a lefty and I was only off-handing the tongs because I knew someone would be watching? 

Because sure, I’m wearing this sweater because it looks cute on me, and it’s critical my detractors notice. But there’s a fine line between “your deodorant smells nice,” and “I notice you’re wearing Old Spice Krakengard– the white tube, not the red one.” 

It’s flattering to be noticed.

It’s unsettling to be catalogued.

This feels especially true because most of the time you’re sitting in the front row of the Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. You’re just involved enough for the yellow knight to hand you a rose before his joust, but you’ll never be a knight yourself, or even a squire. The world might be a stage, but that doesn’t mean you’re anything more than an attendee at a modestly interactive dinner theater. 

But if there’s a clear line between astute deduction and trespass, I haven’t found it. For some reason it looks good to win on Family Feud, but somehow I’ve violated the code duello when I start picking up Steve Harvey’s thoughts in my fillings.