More Dubious Holidays, and Senses

[mrissa]

Siri Ann decided that rather than merely being Beat Mrissa's Butt Day, it was Torture Everybody Day. She announced this having thoroughly vanquished markgritter, though she did, in fact, beat my butt several times. There you have it: Torture Everybody Day. An even more dubious holiday. Though if your idea of torturing me involves bringing me chocolate hazelnut torte...well, darn anyway. What a horrible fate for me. I think the Geneva Conventions are involved somewhere in there.


Writing about being scent-oriented has gotten me into several conversations about it off lj. Some quasi-random thoughts:

Having a strong sense of smell means that if I am a close enough friend to hug you or even stand fairly close, I know what your body smells like. If you use scented soap, deodorant, etc., I also know what those things smell like. But unless you bathe in cologne, they will only be...notes in the chord, for lack of a better analogy. A very strong cologne will be like someone wearing a bright optical illusiony shirt: it will draw the attention more, but if you feel like it the other stuff is still sense-able.

People often say things like, "Oh, don't hug me, I'm all sweaty." To me, this is like saying, "Don't hug me, my shirt is a very bright color." Yes, it is...and it still is when I'm at arm's length from you. If you're near enough that I can hear you and might be trying to hug you, you're near enough that I can smell your sweatiness already. This is okay. There are worse things than fresh, active, healthy human sweat. I would have a heck of a lot less fun in life if I got upset at smelling somebody sweaty, even if I do smell it more strongly than most people.

You know all those old old SF stories where they tried to come up with scent symphonies or other similar new art forms? It's probably your fault we don't have those things. Instead we have things like the abomination that is Yankee Candle, because most people don't have a strong enough or delicate enough sense of smell to appreciate carefully composed scents. The ones who do are often involved in the perfume industry, which tries much harder to be a marketing (of you) industry than an art form or even an entertainment. Unless you-all start marrying us for our noses or genetically engineering kids for better smell, we'll probably never get scent compositions on a widespread or serious level.

Most foods I don't like are foods whose texture I don't like. This is lucky, since I can't un-smell what you're eating if you're eating with me. Or maybe luck isn't the dominant factor at all.

We don't have as much scent vocabulary as I could use. Much of it is either taste vocabulary or analogy vocabulary ("like grass" or "like wet wool"). My mom and I can communicate about scent because we can smell equal amounts of stuff and have talked about it for awhile. Unfortunately, none of this is intuitive; someone else with a strong sense of smell will not automatically know what we mean that something smells "sort of to the left and up." So if you ask what you smell like and I list off a couple of things like your soap and your lotion and then wave my hands and say "like a [your name]," it's just that I lack vocabulary. Or that the vocabulary I have would sound unpleasant when the reality is not.

Scent-sensitive people learn not to talk about a lot of this stuff. If you share your home with people and smell that they are ill, it's not considered polite to offer them remedies for the sniffles they haven't mentioned (at best; at worse, it's considered a little crazy). It is perfectly polite to tell your friends that you were thinking about what they were saying after they'd gone, even that you could hear their voice in your head repeating something to you, but telling them that you were happy to smell them in your house or clothing after they'd gone is generally not nice, or else implies more than you might want it to. It sounds more intimate to people than sight or sound, and yet it's unavoidable. Unintended intimacy, I guess. But you can't warn people by saying, "if I hug you, I will smell you," because that's...more than a little weird, frankly.

porphyrin mentioned that her sense of smell had been heightened during pregnancy, and that this was not uncommon. I don't think it's the same experience. I used the analogy of cochlear implants with her, and it's what I believe: it is entirely different to have a strong sense from birth than to get it later. People with cochlear implants have to work very, very hard to learn to filter the data they're receiving and place it in context. People with "normal" or excellent hearing do it automatically. Also, most of us are not nauseated a lot of the time, which helps.

Some smells are perfectly bearable at one strength and horrible at another. I once got a shampoo that felt to me like someone had made a mint truncheon and was attempting to rhythmically beat the inside of my nostrils with it. I like mint. Not that much mint.

When they discontinue my lotion and I have to choose new, it feels like a stranger is following me around the house, hovering at my shoulder, for days and days. Same for the hand soaps we have in the bathroom, shampoos, body wash, detergent, and dish detergent. I do not change such products lightly. It's very distracting when I do.


Okay, enough spamming my friends page for one day. I'm going to poke the book with a long metaphorical stick and then get some rest.

Comments

[oldmotherchaos.livejournal.com]

Fascinating post. My sense of smell is largely pathetic -- taste is probably my strongest sense -- and I'd never really considered the implications, particularly socially.

Thank you.

[cooperati.livejournal.com]

i've noticed my sense of taste seems to wane at times, and at other times i don't notice. but i notice this when i find i want to have large amounts of tobasco and garlic in my food, and i fail to realize how much pepper i put in my stew.

it's when i want to taste more that i realize i have to because i taste less. but i'm not a jalepeno guy. dude, i will never like the smell of those things.

on occasion i find i can smell better. not that i want to. because then i go buy cinnemon sticks. as for lotions, yuck. i will never understand them, nor petroleum jelly. my wife puts that on her foot every morning and i just cringe and look away. i would rather stick my head in a bucket full of steaming tar than want to put petroleum jelly on my little finger.

of course, it should be noted that i have never stuck my head in a bucket full of steaming tar. so who knows?

-=T=-

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Hm. I wonder if this is how my mom feels. She's smells things I can't perceive. She used to be able to tell I'd had peanut butter toast for breakfast, *after* I'd showered and brushed teeth. Amazing.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have nearly the sense of smell you do, but I can definitely tell when my husband is sick. Or that my own spit smells like my mom's. (I know hers because, you know, that icky mom-thing where they spit on a tissue and wipe your cheek when you're little?) And for a couple of years after we traveled to Australia I got flashbacks to that trip when I used the same variety of shampoo I'd taken with me there.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have some pretty Proustian scent-memory.

This is also a big part of why I was uncomfortable in California: everything smelled wrong all the time.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

It's fascinating to hear about such a different way of relating to the world.

I find I'm not uncomfortable thinking about you smelling me with that degree of precision. But, weirdly, I seem to be a bit uncomfortable talking about it much. Stupid monkey brain.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

As an athlete, I'd have to say I warn people that I'm all sweaty, because I'm all sweaty, not because I'm afraid they'll find my smell offensive. I find it a bit gross to hug a sweaty person if I'm feeling clean myself. I never minded hugging my teammates after a race we'd all run, but I didn't like it so much if I wasn't also participating.

I know what you mean about the people smell lingering though, just a little bit. Jeff doesn't wear scented stuff ("plain regular" is the mantra when we're buying soap, laundry detergent, fabric softener, shaving gel, or anything else with multiple scent options), but when we started dating, after he'd left, I could curl up where he'd been sitting and still smell him.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

"I dunno. That fire has a snorky, brambish smell." --Hobbes

Your post made me think of that Calvin & Hobbes strip where they were talking about no words for smells. It might be that we rely more on our senses of sight and hearing than on smell; we have entire regions of the brain dedicated to processing language and other sounds, and a whole lobe just for vision, whereas smell is just a small portion of the brain down near the limbic system. This does make smell more "primitive" and emotional than vision, though; smells can have a huge effect on our moods and impressions of something, even if we can't name why.

So! How did Beat Mrissa's Butt day go? :-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Lots of things start out comfortable doing and only later get comfortable discussing. Most of them come with more practice than smelling precision does, and many of them are more mutual with the person you're talking to.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think there's a difference between someone who is dripping and visibly sweaty and someone who is mildly sweaty. And if they're dripping, I can see that!

Now: did you feel more comfortable with the Jeff/smell thing because you were romantically involved him than you would have if it had been Angela you smelled? Or was it just that your reaction was different and stronger and more noticeable (as it should be, since you weren't involved with/interested in Angela)? Because I find lots of people are comfortable talking about smelling a spousal unit or even former significant other, and not so much with friends or family members, and I can't tell whether it's more socially acceptable or whether the smell made a greater impact on them or what.

It's entirely possible, with pheromones and all, that we're more attuned to mates' or potential mates' scent. I just don't have any way of knowing, because it all registers with me on a fairly conscious level.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But I can name why.

Hmm. I wonder if there's a bigger wiring difference than I thought. I'd been going around assuming that it was just the nose itself that was more sensitive, but having lived all of one's life that way may mean that the brain has gotten more wiring that direction than average.

So many times I want to get my own and my friends' brains examined in great and colorful detail! I actually have a mental list of friends whose brains I'd love to see scanned, based on conversations we've had about perception and processing. Sigh. If only neurotechnology was that cheap.

My Butt was only Beaten a moderate amount by Miss Siri Ann, and Gavin refused to do it at all. (He did smack markgritter's butt once, though.) So that was a good thing, I guess.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, I do recall being able to "smell Angela" when we first started being roommates, and I don't think it made me uncomfortable. It's just the sort of thing where you notice it, because it's different. I wouldn't say I can smell either of them anymore, because they're "normal" to me, and I probably couldn't pick out their particular scents if given some sort of scent quiz thing. It's like when we moved into our house. It definitely smelled like someone else's house for the first couple of months. But now it smells like us, and I don't notice it, because it does.

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

Have you read Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses? The section on smell was really interesting to me. I don't have much of a sense of smell, or else I just don't see it as important. She talks about the problem of not having a vocabulary for scents.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've read it. It has ups and downs, but I enjoyed it anyway.