Lately I seem to be encountering a lot of people with some kind of odor issue. Like I get on the treadmill; guy gets on next to me with heinous morning breath. And of course since he's exercising and breathing heavily, I'm getting some healthy whiffs. We go to a play, guy next to me with weird musty smell. Last week at the Toad the Wet Sprocket concert, we had finally staked out this awesome spot on the floor where Paul could actually see to his satisfaction, and this guy sidles up to me absolutely reeking of cologne. I kept having to stick my face into my own cleavage so I could breathe. Why do people do that to themselves? Do they expect that they can attract potential sex partners by using massive amounts of strong smelling fumes to disorient them, like chloroform or something? "If I distract them with these vapors they won't notice I have a receding hairline and a black tshirt emblazoned with a wolf howling at the full moon. Genius!"
We've been getting up early in the morning before work to exercise and surprisingly we have managed not to kill one another or any random pedestrians in the process. Neither I nor the Mister are what you could call early risers. We're more the roll-over-at-7-am-decide-to-sleep-for-ten-more-minutes-accidentally-sleep-for-another-two-and-a-half-hours-and-waste-your-whole-day types. But we are in our thirties, and when you are in your thirties you have to exercise a lot or you start to look like Carroll O'Connor. For me it happens very very quickly. After about 5 days with no exercise I have to keep the top button on my pants undone when I'm sitting which invariably makes for an embarrassing moment at work when I realize I forgot to do the button back up when I'm halfway to the copy room. Then I have to try to do my pants up all surreptish, or if there are people around I have to kind of hold my copies awkwardly in front of my abdomen like a twelve year old boy who has the misfortune of being called up to the blackboard while he's having one of those grownup man-time moments. It's frankly less trouble just to exercise.
We went to Chicago for our friend Anish's wedding a few weeks ago, and we seriously ate our way across town. We had to. This person wanted to meet for brunch, that person wanted to meet for dinner. You rarely are actually hungry for three restaurant sized meals per day but what does hunger have to do with it? We were on vacation and there was food everywhere we went. We ate stuff that we would never eat at home, like caramel corn. Who eats that? It wasn't like we were at a carnival, we just bought it on the street near Keland's apartment, where we were staying. Caramel corn! If they'd sold funnel cake we probably would have eaten that too. Kind of the Edmund Hillary approach to feeding ourselves. Needless to say I wore skirts almost the whole trip.
We're back now and more or less back into a routine. But all this upkeep really is exhausting. It just never ends. Try on clothes, buy clothes, wash clothes. Color hair, cut hair, shampoo hair, style hair. Cleanse, exfoliate, moisturize, put on makeup. Shave, buff, wax, trim, pluck. Strength training and cardio. Stretching. Flossing, brushing, gargling. Sometimes I really see the appeal of just completely letting myself go. It would be so easy; the inertia would just take over so fast. One week you're a well-groomed woman in decent shape with clean clothes and two separate eyebrows, the next you're a hirsute lump of widening unbathed flesh unable to leave your bed and washing yourself with a rag on a stick.
Well, off to lunch!
Comments (3)
You said it. Last night Melissa and I were at the Bamboo Club for dinner. I'll grant you that in her pregnancy she has a bionic nose, but I'm not without my own sensitivity. So when this wrinkly old leather bag walked in we were both overwhelmed by her perfume. My eyes nearly fell out of my face. I wanted to cram my sinuses with wasabi to mask the sickeningly sweet chemical attack wafting off this old dame. Yuck.
No amount of perfume can hide ugly or old. These people must be stopped!
Posted by Damien Geoffrion | June 25, 2008 1:51 PM
Posted on June 25, 2008 13:51
I had a Latin teacher(your mom, all your aunts, and Uncle Cliff had her too and she LOVED Clifford!) who was a very cultured woman, and she had the worst halitosis and B.O. that I have ever smelled. Pepere said her car just reeked so bad that he and Dick(the dubbah)used to fight over who would work on it. She was so nice though...and seemed to be clean. I think that is like a physical illness or something, unlike what you are talking about which is just plain being a pig. Also, at the end of his life, Grampa Boutet used to put the Old Spice on so heavily that you could friggin' TASTE it when he walked by! I am sure Auntie Jan will write and tell you about one of the many stinky kids she has had over the years...I bet she picks "BEN." Man, did that boy stink...
Posted by Auntie Patti | June 25, 2008 2:23 PM
Posted on June 25, 2008 14:23
When I was at school, aged 4 though 11 there was a boy called "Stephen." I always remember he was "Stephen" which a "ph" because at one time during this long history he was in class with another Steven, but this one was with a "V" and for some reason for both boys it was very important that everyone knew who was who. I suspect it was really only important to Steven who was desperate for us all to know that he had nothing in common with "Stephen" ... at all, and this is coming from a boy with pigeon toes.
Anyway, I was always getting it wrong. I can't spell and I'm crap at names - that was until the day we had a lesson on mnemonics. You know, where you make up a memorable rhyme to remember the hard stuff? That lesson serves me well to this day when I have to remember shit like the correct order of taxonomic classification of the species - granted, it doesn't come up all that much but when it does I just remember than King Paul Only Fucks Green Sheep and I know I'm looking for Kingdom, Phylum, Order, Family, Genus, Species - but that was years later, in the mnemonics class the best I could come up with was "StePhen, stinks of Piss." Never again did I suffer the Wrath of Steve when asked to spell his name (which he asked a lot!) as a tentative sniff for the least hint of dried wee always kept me true. And it had to be tentative because "Stephen, Stinks of Piss" really stank of piss. I don't know what his daily routine was in the morning but I suspect it went something like this:
Wake up, brush my teeth, oh - need a slash. Should I wazz all over my clothes or use the toilet like everyone else? Hell, I'm not a robot, I got free will, I'm gonna piss on my clothes and show everyone I count for something. Aaahhh ... bet all the kids will want to hang out with me cos I'm a free spirit, but in truth I just wanna be popular.
'Course no one did want to hang out with "Stephen, Stinks of Piss" because he stank very strongly of piss. And this begs the bigger question, not of why people honk that's usually simple biology, the real question is why don't they know they honk?
Last week I had surgery on my arm and I'm not allowed to get the wound wet, and for the first five days I had trouble getting out of bed, so subsequently I've washed little and I ming! Thing is, I know I ming, it's offensive, I've got mushrooms growing out of my armpits and I'm looking forward to the weekend when my girlfriend is back to give me a bed-bath (Result!). But why do all these people with BO, cabbage addictions or who spell their names with "ph" not know it too? Answer than, make a pile of money selling it to Lever Brothers.
Posted by Charles | June 25, 2008 6:54 PM
Posted on June 25, 2008 18:54