I was born with 2.5 kidneys, an extra ureter and 4 of my permanent teeth never showed up. Also mild colour vision deficiency.

I was talking about it with our first lieutenant in the army and he went “Corporal, you’re a mutant!”. “Yes, sir, I am sir.”

God soap cilantro just sucks. I really wish people knew it tastes like gross to like 3-21% of the world population.

I just wish it wasn’t automatically in anything Mexican. I just want to taste what other people taste. :(

What the hey? Let them down!

I recently had to close my store for an hour, because I was the only one working and couldn’t breath due to one customers bad hygiene. People treat me like I’m overly sensitive or making up my discomfort, but to me it feels like being suffocated.

Also I can totally smell roaches, they smell worse than any other thing in existence. Never smelled an ant though. Did not know that was possible.

No anime conventions for you unless you wear a gas mask!

I can smell cockroaches and periods. It’s weird, but I can for some reason

I have a good sense of smell but…that sounds more like cripplingly good

My sense of smell is very sensitive. Like I can detect people have been there by smell too, and often who it was. But I don’t think I’ve ever smelled ants or cockroaches. Thank god too.

Yeah no dude, I keep a ten percent mixture of bleach n water around to sanitize surfaces I use for food prep. This is standard practice. The dishes get soaked in a weak bleach mixture after washing. 3 sinks, wash, bleach, rinse. And there’s pinesol in the mop bucket.

In some areas (depends on local health dept.) restaurant kitchens are required to have weak bleach solutions around for sanitizing food prep surfaces.

The first two are obvious attempts at covering up something worse with “clean” smells, and/or the staff has no idea what “clean” actually means.

Or they’re the cleanest places you’ve never eaten in.

Well put.

Just wanted to point out when an odor is pleasant it’s an aroma.

heavy perfume …

“I don’t care what you smell”

This is one reason I stopped eating lunch with other people. Some people use so much of Deodorant (oh the irony in the name) that the volatile compounds get adsorbed onto the surface of fluids in the mouth and then get tasted and also go into the stomach. All I’d say is - They taste bad.

I don’t think those chemicals are supposed to be edible.

This is basically what the “attachment” thing is they’re referring to in buddhism. It’s not a deep concept. It’s just that it’s mixed into every mental action.

All the meditation practice is just a matter of familiarizing oneself with the different smells in the kitchen of the mind.

If normal thinking is like cooking, meditation is like standing in the kitchen and stopping yourself every time your body goes on autopilot and starts preparing food.

Instead you just stand there, and stand there. If you’re doing vipassana then you’re taking each ingredient off the shelf and giving it a big whiff. One after another. For hours and hours, days, years. You’re getting more and more familiar with that kitchen.

Then, one day while you’re doing your kitchen standing, your nose detects another specific note. A note that’s been there all along, but you never would have noticed if you hadn’t spent so much time cataloguing all the smells of all the ingredients and cleaners. But now you spent thousands of hours getting to know all those scents, and there’s this other scent.

That’s the cockroaches. Now in this analogy, all the time you’ve spent meditating, doing shamatha meditation, you’ve been learning to magically delete parts of the kitchen. The kitchen is your mind so you kind of have magic powers there. You’re meditating. You see the pot go to the stove and start boiling spaghetti. “Nope, no cooking” and the pot goes back and the spaghetti goes back.

All the shamatha meditation has been giving you the telekinesis needed to push things around in the kitchen. The vipassana meditation has been giving you a thorough understanding of what’s in the kitchen, where it goes, how it works.

So you take your knowledge of the kitchen’s contents, and that lets you differentiate and notice the cockroach smell. That’s the result of your vipassana meditation. Identifying the cockroaches as separate from the food is your insight.

Then you use the magic editing powers you’ve developed through shamatha meditation, ie now that you have the insight about the cockroaches, because you’ve done your shamatha you have the strength and control to just say “nah” and make the roaches disappear.

At first you’re worried. What if the kitchen doesn’t work? But you cook some stuff. It works fine. Things smell better, it’s more pleasant to cook now, in a way you never knew it could be more pleasant.

Anyway. I’ve done a lot of zen training, and I’ve always said that the word “attachment” is often poorly interpreted. It’s not the exact same thing that english word refers to. It’s just the closest word we have for this very specific thing happening in consciousness.

The fact that buddhist insight can’t be conveyed in words does NOT mean it’s out of this world or esoteric. The smell of garlic cannot be conveyed in words either

We can kinda shapes and sounds using words. We almost can’t describe tastes and smells at all, except by comparing them to similar tastes and smells. That doesn’t mean shapes and sounds are more real than tastes and smells. It just means our language doesn’t go there.

So all the mystery of zen buddhism isn’t because of some deep well of thing that can’t be seen, hidden behind nonsense words. It’s just a mystery in words because it’s like the smell of cockroaches: no way to teach it to someone other than handing them a container full of cockroaches and saying “take a whiff of this”.

There’s no way to hand someone a container full of dukkha (“attachment” in english) and say “get a whiff of this; this is the thing that causes your suffering”. Handing someone containers of samples to smell, in the mind, is hard. All you can do is give people instructions for being in the right spot to figure it out for themselves: “Sit down. Empty your mind. Pay attention to each thought that comes up, notice it, let it go”.

In the analogy this becomes

“Go to your kitchen. Don’t cook anything. If you find that you’re cooking something, take a moment to notice how what you were cooking smells, then put it away.”

Sorry for the wall of text. I always say I’m gonna keep it short and then the minimum words to get the idea across ends up being huge. I’ll get better at articulating this.

Anyway, this just reminded me of the buddhist thing, and I realized this “cockroaches in the kitchen walls” analogy works nicely with why meditation is done and how it leads to enlightenment.

Weird. Marijuana has an iconic, skunk-like / rotten bologna smell to me. I can smell someone smoking up to maybe 500 feet away, sometimes from the inside of my car. It’s a deeply repugnant smell.

The strange thing being, I’ve smelled the actual flowers and the plant up close, and it just smells like grass. It only smells like shit when it’s burning, oddly enough.

No idea why. Everything about the “natural smell” up close screams “this is a plant and can’t harm you in any way shape or form”. That specific experience made me in favor of decriminalization.

Smells are very localized

Smells are airborne. They move with the air.

You can walk into a house and tell they’re cooking dinner, just by smells that have traveled 50 feet from the kitchen to the front door.

I am already petitioning for a de-federalization with any instance that allows those swears. Not in my good Christian Fediverse!

Haha get rekt sucks to suck!

/s

it’s all I think about

Joke’s on you, I dig this literally shit.

When you take a dump and feel the smell from the toilet - it’s an actual shit particles reaching your nose and mouth. You eat shit while you shit.

I smell them outdoors from quite a long distance.

I’m convinced these people are just making it up, I’ve been alive nearly 40 years and not once heard of this being a thing.

Formic acid does really smells like steel tastes. But I’d blame the nickel for the taste, iron tastes differently.

Ya on the floor, outside smells like bugs a bit too (and dirty and a million other things).

I can smell ant hills that are far enough that I can’t see them from an open car window.

Bright lights, especially flashing ones, stimulate the same nerve cluster that the urge to sneeze comes from and can help trigger a sneeze that is loading. Some people are more susceptible to that stimulus than others.

I wiggle my fingers in front of my nose in a sort of “multilegged gallop” motion, as if ky hand were trying to scramble up the bridge of my nose and slipping. But with no touch.

I’ll look at what I want!

Cilantro tastes like bathwater/ wet washcloth to me.

Another famous one… bookstores make a lot of people need to poop. https://www.buzzfeed.com/farrahpenn/urge-to-poop-in-bookstore-mariko-aoki-phenomenon

He means the photic sneeze reflex.

🎶 When-the-sun hits-your-nose and you sneeze un-con-trolled IN THE MORNIIIING 🎶

Wow, interesting

The photic sneeze reflex (also known as ACHOO syndrome, a contrived acronym for Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst)

Now you’ve got me wondering if your super hearing stops at machinery or if you could hear the human body doing it’s thing, provided a stethoscope and test subject- I mean willing participant.

No, they probably just rolled all of that into the ADHD diagnosis.

Oh yeah, I get that too, where my brain just decides not to decipher spoken words suddenly. At any rate, noise cancelling headphones are awesome.

Nah, I figured this out in the military. I was always the last guy to start using my night vision device. Now, to be fair this was 20+ years ago and night vision devices have come a long way since then. Even in my years we got an upgrade that was much better and I used it a lot more. But I was also the one guy hitting all the night fire targets. So there was definitely something there before I went and got old.

Haha, I sleep like the dead.

No we don’t.

Sure, but then do a simple search first and then you can engage with other people with “Guys, I just learned that some people can smell ants!”