The question is what sense am I losing?

I figured that turning 30 would mostly be a bad thing. I get jet lagged easily. Three beers turns me into a wreck the next day. I keep scaring away girls by telling stories about Europe that involve lots of different currencies.

But there have been two upsides:

1) I'm getting hairier.
2) My sense of smell has become remarkably acute.

With respect to Upside #1, let me not overstate things. I would estimate that the time it would take me to grow a full beard has declined from somewhere around "half-life of a carbon atom" to "duration of the reign of a communist dictator", and I might have double my chest hairs from 7 to 14. Baby steps. Baby steps.

With respect to Upside #2, I can't tell if I am developing this sense globally, or if I'm just noticing the incredible range of odors of the people in Seattle. I've blogged about this previously, but there are some really terrible smelling people here. I can now not only spot these folks a mile away, but I feel like I can predict if they will only smell bad when I walk by, or if they are leaving a trail of their scent. Kind of like a shadow of stink. I can detect the difference between "booze only" stink and "booze + piss" stink.

I've also become more aware of women and the perfume's they wear. For the most part I think I just appreciate anything that is feminine and not gross, but I find my head spinning when I pass a group of young ladies who are slathered in various fancy perfumes. This isn't always a good thing. The other day I was sitting on the bus when I had the overwhelming sense of panic... I was sure that the girl next to me was going to start yelling at me or crying or asking me if I thought her jeans made her look fat. It took me a while to figure this out, but she was wearing the same perfume as Crazy _____, a girl I used to date. Luckily there was no drama.

And this is the point in the post where I don't have anything else to say, nor do I have a cute way to wrap things up. So I'm done.

I smell strongly of flowers

Apartment 403 was a touch musty when we first moved in, so I bought one of those plug-in air freshener thingamajigs. That scent turned out to be pretty overpowering at times, so I don't leave it plugged in all the time. Apparently some of the scented oil leaked out onto the body of the device, because as I went to plug it in my hand came away covered in a thin layer of artificial flower smell.

This is going to be a complete disaster, because this scent seems impervious to traditional cleansing methods. I am currently emitting (albeit sweetly pleasant) odors at long range. I may need to wear gloves to work tomorrow.

And since I have no better context to work this picture into the blog, here's the very pretty tree I look at every morning from my bus stop. Seattle has a strange spring... it's already very green, but the flowering trees all seem to bloom quite early, well before the other deciduous flora in the city. Sadly, the wind and rain knocks off most of the blossoms once they are out.


Yuck. My hand is starting to make me ill.