Something weird about me

At pretty regular intervals, I'm sometimes burdened with an acute sense of smell. If it weren't also accompanied by terrible gut pain, it might be more amusing. Folks at work have even accused me of having a psychic sense of smell. So, maybe the pain is the trade-off for my "gift." Once, when my boss walked into my office, I could smell the yellow roses he'd bought for his house on him. When I asked him about it, he got very freaked out. Right now, my office is filled with the almost overwhelming smell of the handsoap from the bathroom. This is a marked improvement over the general smell of earwax that seems to be permeating the floor. And, the woman down the hall had some kind of warm fast food for breakfast. Worse is, at the moment, everything in the house smells like the dog. Everything on my bed smells like the dog and even my clean clothes smell like the detergent and the dog. I saw an interesting show on the Discovery Channel about how cats recognize members of their "pride" (if one can call the groups domestic cats live in "prides") by how they smell, and that they spend a great deal of time making sure they all smell like each other. One scientist was hypothesizing that this may be why cats seem to cuddle up to the very people who are most allergic to cats--by virtue of their allergies, they are the least likely to smell like any cat group, and thus, might appear to be ripe for adoption. It makes me wonder about smell, though. Scientists say that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory, and, though I usually am not aware of the ambient smells of the world, they must always be there, and I wonder if my nose and brain are just chugging away, bringing me bits of information that I usually ignore, like the scroll at the bottom of the news cast.