“Genetic quirk”, you say?
“What’s your mutation? Teleportation? Laser Eyes? Weaponized Tornadoes?”
“…I… I can smell ants… how about yours?”
“Oh… well… my mutation is that cilantro tastes like chalk to me.”
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. :(
The weirdest thing happened when I was recovering from covid. I couldn’t really taste much, but cilantro suddenly had a perfume-like scent. It eventually went back to normal after I recovered, but I definitely have a healthy level of sympathy for people who taste soapy cilantro now
Exposure therapy works for this. You can still detect the chemical that made it taste that way, but the brain can rewire to perceive it as pleasant. If you’re serious about fixing the problem, start by adding small amounts to dishes and work your way up as your tolerance changes.
The mortality ratio of that school gives me pause.
Also, so many old white guys hanging on the wall.
I have a friend who can smell cockroaches no joke. We always take her restaurant suggestions very seriously.
I can smell ants and cockroaches. I can also smell when someone has been in my house hours after they leave. Its annoying as hell to have this sense of smell since its considered rude to point out that someone stinks. To me its like they are screaming in a small room.
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.
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.
I don’t even have the greastest sense of smell, I might even consider it impaired, but personal experience begs me to suggest never applying at your local public library then.
Bedbugs smell worse than roaches. Roaches will make me leave a place. Bedbugs make me run in terror.
In 95 I was staying at a hotel that had a D&D convention. I was with a group of union boilermakers and we got gripped at by the staff for refusing to allow some of those stinkers on the elevator with us.
Yes it’s a fact that obese people smell worse than fit people, so if it was a marathon runners convention and everyone actually bathed daily, I’m sure going without deodorant wouldn’t be an issue. Too much fucking might be an issue if the majority of the women aren’t on hormonal birth control.
But I think the issue with anime conventions isn’t lack of deodorant, it’s thinking a shower is something you take every 4-7 days, and ‘eww don’t touch your buttcrack to clean it, that’s nasty!’
I may get flack from the twox crowd for this comment, but talking to my fiance was like talking to a guy when she got off hormonal birth control. Conversation is just… chill now.
That’s probably the next big “oops, we fucked up bad the last 50 years, but men’s birth control is hard!”
I can smell cockroaches and periods. It’s weird, but I can for some reason
I take testosterone which makes my sense of pheromone smell increase like crazy (not just sweat, I can go into a truck stop late at night and tell if someone was in there somewhere and peed and how hydrated they were, or if someone just had sex in the shower in there… or just an orgasm.)
Sometimes I’ll walk into our own house bathroom half an hour after my fiance left for work and get an overwhelming woah, she’s definitely on her period right now smell or conversely, “oh yeah, tonight could be a fun night.”
Our oldest started showering in the mornings before school, and its become a subconscious game (I think, to him) of who can get in the shower first, because I do not want to smell his… shower… my entire shower.
Humans are capable of absolutely incredible senses when they’re finely tuned. But our senses are so out of whack, literally, in so many different ways we barely have concepts or words for yet. We have known about, as one example, estrogen-raising chemicals being in plastics leeching directly into our bodies and soil and water and food supplies for over 30 years now (BPA), (when estrogen levels rise, testosterone levels lower, and vice versa. same is true for many core bodily systems). Then around 2010 they did a study that found some of these new lightly tested BPA-free alternative plastics released even more estrogen into the system than BPA did. How’s that for a chucklefuck
Plastics, and then leaded gasoline, and then PFASs shortly after (or before) that… well, when a molecule or series of molecules is found that greatly benefits civilization in some way, people will die. People will sit under oath in front of the supreme court swearing they had no idea how harmful their products were.
It’s very unfortunate, because the species are being modified in so many unforseen ways. Not just humans. Alex Jones got meme’d so hard for the chemicals are turning the fuckin’ frogs gay!
I’m not sure what I’m ranting about now. I’m just sad for our species and those species affected by us and unable to do anything about it. It’s never as simple as it’s ALL profits and follow the money! because we’ve been able to make so much progress as humans through the use of breakthrough technologies like PFASs and plastic. But, at what cost? Our current methodology is to let the major corporations sell these new breakthrough molecules far and wide, and then in 5 years or 5 decades we start to see mainstream scientific acceptance that “okay, it’s really bad, we have to do something about this”…
Sure, though, it did some good in the meantime.
I can smell when a woman has her period if I smell her skin, so not at any distance other than intimately. My best guess is all the hormonal changes alter pheromones from the normal and we can pick up on that.
Not like it is a bad smell, just her normal natural scent changes.
I’m one of these people. I can smell an apartment roach infestation from the front door, every time.
And yes, restaurants always get the “sniff check” before we sit down. No-go odors are:
- bleach
- pine-sol (amonia)
- heavy perfume (think “Glade plugin-in”)
- insects (roaches, etc)
- pet odor (wet dog, litterbox)
- sewage (usually a dry floor drain but that’s still not okay)
- dingy carpet (think: “old movie theater”)
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. And they obviously don’t care what olfaction means to someone trying to enjoy a meal, which says heaps about what they think food service actually is. Everything else just speaks to the “I don’t care what you smell” part, or there’s something very wrong with how the kitchen is run. /rant
An example of a top-shelf dining odor experience? I once went to a Japanese restaurant at opening time. The only smell in the dining room was that of the specific kind of imported cedar in the cutting boards. This is traditionally cleaned with boiling hot water, and nothing else. This released a gentle woody and pine-y scent that just filled the space and invited the senses. I came hungry, but I sat down ravenous. The meal to follow was something I will never forget.
Edit: some clarification since this got some traction. I know that bleach and ammonia are s-tier disinfectants and absolutely necessary for food prep, health standards, and the rest. I use this stuff at home. My issue is with establishments that utterly fail at ventilating these odor and spoil the dining experience with strong chemical odors. Looking deeper I find very strong cleaning odors (long after opening hours) suspicious since it’s very easy to splash stuff around, giving the impression of cleanliness, but not actually clean anything. Strong chemical smells also make it impossible to detect sewage, rot, mold, soil, and other things that would easily flag a restaurant. I’d rather not take the chance.
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.
There is a difference between standard bleach and pinesol usage and using it as a way to conceal other smells or problems. Or even worse, not knowing how to use those chemicals to clean. You know how to use a weak bleach solution for cooking surfaces, does your bartender? I’ve seen front of house employees over use cleaning chemicals because isn’t it better to use stronger chemicals to clean. My favorite was the hostess who didn’t want to clean the bathroom so she would just fill the soap and and paper products and fill a spray bottle with Lysol that she would spray around to give the smell of a clean bathroom.
It’s unlikely anyone will notice the smell of properly used cleaning products.
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.
Bro, bleach is literally how you are supposed to sanitize restaurant surfaces. This thread is wild.
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.
I assume people just can’t identify the smell of cockroaches until they learned it? Similar to people being oblivious to the smell of marijuana when not familiar with it.
I’m not sure I would recognize the smell of roaches if I didn’t keep them as food for other animals. Stinky little buggers.
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.
One more example for your kitchen analogy, albeit coming from a different direction, is probably the smell of Durian.
When you first encounter the smell, you experiences pretty intensive stench - maybe like rotten meat. When you manage to get over it and eat it a bunch of times it does not stink for you anymore. You still recognize it’s a very intense smell, but it’s not stench anymore.
However, for everyone else unfamiliar with it it still stinks like hell.
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.
Similar to people being oblivious to the smell of marijuana when not familiar with it.
I can’t smell certain types of marijuana, I can smell the more home grown type. Now I have to be next to 6 people smoking to smell it. I don’t smoke it either, so it’s not that. I think they’ve crop engineered it to take the smell out maybe? It could be just me.
TBF, there are lots of things with a smell similar to cockroaches. Some of them wouldn’t be a red flag to be found at a restaurant. Also, smells are very localized, and I doubt your friend walks through the kitchen.
But yeah, I’ve gone away from restaurants because they smelled like cockroaches.
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.
Dispersion varies widely due to the kind of smell, intensity, and air circulation.
Most smells do not travel 50 feet.
Wait, is that true? Is someone able to smell ants?
There are lots of weird genetic traits. Sneezing triggered by sunlight is another funny one.
Veritasium video on that one:
I got the “cilantro tastes like soap” gene personally. Would much rather have gotten the, “Always remember where I left my car keys” gene, or maybe the, “Come up with witty retorts on the spot instead of two hours later in the shower” one.
At least you don’t have my “sky-high cholesterol no matter what you eat” gene.
Also artificial sweeteners have an unpleasant chemical aftertaste that lingers for a long time. Apparently that’s generic too…
I love cilantro, but I got the celery tastes bitter and spicy gene. So many people tell me it’s tasteless but it has a strong, terrible taste to me.
Cilantro tasted like soap to me until my wife described it as lemony, and it suddenly tasted different and now I like cilantro. Senses are weird
I love cilantro but one time I tasted the soap flavor. I had done a stir fry with cilantro and left the spoon in the still hot pot and there had been some cilantro stuck to the bottom of the spoon that sat there and cooked for as long as it took for the big pot to cool down. Then when I was doing dishes I picked up the spoon and I saw big bunch of cilantro so I ate it and it was horribly nasty and tasted like straight up hand soap. I thought for sure that some soap fell or splashed onto it but no it was just the cilantro. Never happened again either.
The Frech have this good phrase, L’esprit de l’escalier
I have that! Sneezed twice today because of bright sunlight. It can sometimes also be triggered voluntarily by looking at a bright light. You can’t trigger it multiple times in a row though. I suspect this is because sinuses need to recover from the shock of the sneeze.
Wait that’s a genetic quirk? I do that shit all the time with “the sneeze that won’t sneeze”
Still can’t believe that some people are unable to smell rain coming in the summer!
People used to make fun of me all the time for sniffing and saying “smells like it’s going to rain soon”. Couldn’t even tell you what it smells like… It just smells like the concept of it starting to rain
I’ve met others who knew exactly what I was talking about, but not many
I have sunlight-sneezing, my thoughts are spoken word, I can read in dreams, the dress is gold, and I alway hear “laurel.”
What others are there?
Maybe not genetically, but fun fact about sneezing-quirks: There exists "Sneezing induced by sexual ideation or orgasm. Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2084455232396039941&hl=de&as_sdt=0,5#d=gs_qabs&t=1716906331494&u=%23p%3D-Y8j_fJVLLsJ
Smell is how ants communicate with one another so maybe these ant sniffers will be the first humans who can speak ant.
https://academic.oup.com/ae/article/61/2/85/1756864
https://www.livescience.com/why-ants-smell-weird
However, the sense of smell in humans is far less developed, and there has been recent controversy over what, exactly, the odorous house ant smells like. This species belongs to a large group of ants whose members are thought to smell like blue cheese (Forney and Markovetz 1971) [link is direct 3.0 mb .pdf download from elsevier], yet numerous online sources report their odor as “rancid butter,” “cleaning solution,” or, most commonly, “rotten coconuts.”
Specifically, the house hippo ant.
*The actual factual paper was actually literally published in 2015, no cap.
At the same time, Penick had people rate what they thought the ant smelled like. Most people said blue cheese, but some thought it smelled like rotted coconut. So Penick rotted a coconut in his backyard and found a mold growing on it that, sure enough, is the same mold (Penicillium roqueforti) that’s used to produce blue cheese. Another mystery, solved.
So American house ants, rotten coconuts and blue cheese all smell the same. Life is weird.
Me who spent months taking Tupperware boxes full of cockroaches out of the freezer and separating them by hand because our ants were picky eaters: I still smell them, to this day.
Thanks ants. Thants.
yikes. how do you react when you get a whiff? is it already too late and you don’t smell them until they are next to you, or is it a general “oh wow you have a roach prob in this house”
if its in my room, that shitling better gtfo my place. if they just arrived i can usually smell them when theyre around 1m off me. but if they been chilling in the room i can smell them once i enter the room. imagine like walking little turd. the more they are the worse the smell.
The smell like pepper to me. Well, you know how when you crush bricks or rocks it kinda has a peppery smell? It’s that pepper scent.
what bricks are you crushing mon
maybe it’s smell of dust, like what you can smell on dusty unpaved road in summer
Nah it’s specifically when they’re crushed. Not gravel smells, that smells different. You never crushed a rock or a brick?
I can, they also taste absolutely abhorrent and ruin food they are in for me. It’s a very bitter chemical taste and smell.
Who the fuck is out here censoring fuck?
You can’t say shit or dead or suicide or fuck anymore because the internet has become C O R P O R A T E
I am already petitioning for a de-federalization with any instance that allows those swears. Not in my good Christian Fediverse!
Holy shit I thought I was either full of shit or a mutant freak. I’m happy to be a mutant freak.
I feel so validated right now you guys have no idea.
Congratulations on your mutation. This one sucks less than the cilantro one.
