“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”

• John Lennon, Beautiful Boy

And unbeknownst to me until I went to check to see if I was right about the origination (I wasn’t), “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans”

• Allen Saunders, Readers Digest, January 1957

There are dozens of us!

Geriatric millennial checking in from 1983.

I like the “Oregon Trail generation” name someone mentioned earlier too, I might lean into that one more in the future. Remember playing Math Blaster on an Apple Mac Classic in elementary school computer lab? Then you were there too!

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords as a basis for a system of government.

First OS: MS-DOS 5

First Linux (many years later): Yellow Dog on one of those dome-shaped iMacs with the PPC chips

The answer is easy, but to get to it, a little bit of a thought experiment is probably helpful. I say, look to how we define our own left and right sides for guidance. When facing forward, our left hand is on the left side of our body, and the right hand is on the right side of the body. Perspective doesn’t matter, and there is no ambiguity.

Now we need to extend this to the bed. A bed has a head, just like a person does. So where would its face be? It seems clear to me, unless you are sleeping on a dead mattress, that the face is clearly going to be looking upwards at the ceiling at the head of the bed. So the left side of the bed, if you are standing at the foot of the bed looking at it, would be on your right. Just like the left side of your friend, when you are standing in front of them and looking at them, is on your right.

Now if you just imagine the mattress to be perfectly spherical and in a frictionless environment…

(Obviously just having fun with this answer, but it’s also the right answer)