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.
I work at a library and they wouldn’t let us install them when we built a new building. We do though have a place nearby that lets people clean up but not stay there.
Best way to get rid of bedbugs is by turning your house into a temporary sauna. Ensuring everywhere reaches some 50º Celsius will kill all the little fuckers.
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.
I’ve never actually been to an anime convention and had no idea how common anime fans with poor hygiene actually existing was until I read some of the horror stories when this was posted before.
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 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.
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.
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”…
Thanks high testosterone bro. Your comment made me remember when I was 18ish and would not drink soda, barely eat sugar, wake up to do exercises on the bedroom floor… That was my prime and for a reason. I’ll try to go by next month reducing my sugar intake at least and do pushups when I wake up, start challenging myself again.
Take it or leave it but my advice (sometimes I take it sometimes I’m a hypocrite) but tomorrow never comes. Fuck next month. There is no reason for you to wait to eat less sugar. If it’s a matter of finances, get a head of romaine lettuce and some carrots and much away for a few days. Feel the sugar withdrawal as your body freaks out wondering what has changed and starts realigning those neurons. After a few days of that, a generic slice of sandwich bread will taste like cake. Use that wasted $30 of high sugar snacks and food as motivation to stop eating this poison. If it’s purely a waste issue, find the first homeless person you see and give them a big bag of high sugar food. Even if its frozen meals they’ll give them to their buddies and use the microwaves at a convenience store and eat like kings for day.
Honestly, a big part of this comment was me talking to myself, but not about sugar. But if it helps you, I’m happy.
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.
Oh yeah me as well. I can also smell when someone has a disease. I know cancer or at least the type my grandmother had but some of them I have no idea what is wrong with them. I can also differentiate different kinds of drugs.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I can see a place smelling like a public swimming pool being off-putting. 10% bleach is really common across the food industry, though. Making bread, jerky, kombucha, and various grains, each facility had the same bleach concentration for cleaning (among other cleaning and sanitizing solutions).
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.
This is exactly the kind of BS I’m talking about. I once knew some pool lifeguards that had to rotate through bathroom cleaning duty. I overheard that their MO was to just get everything wet with a hose, splash pinesol on the floor, and call it a day.
and fill a spray bottle with Lysol that she would spray around to give the smell of a clean bathroom
Depending upon the formula of Lysol, that’s actually worse than not doing anything.
We’ve got a brand called Lyzol and that seems to be the same formula as Lysol, before it got regulated in the US.
If this were to be sprayed, I’d consider the area poisoned.
Lyzol
This contains some chemical that lingers even if you wash the floor with water afterwards and slowly produces volatile compounds, and stays for > a week.
This gives me (and a few other people on quora) a headache.
Again, from reports on quora, the smelly substance also tends to jump onto one’s hand, on touching the surface, making it disastrous for cooking.
Nowadays, I use Dettol disinfectant liquid, which stops smelling after about 1/2 hour of wind.
Agreed! But “smells like cleanser” does not mean “is clean”. It jams up my radar (sense of smell) so it’s tough to figure out if anything else is up. I’d rather detect no off odors or cleansers at all to be sure.
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.
I do. Been keeping a journal since 2000 when I made my first entry on a plane to europe, because the guy who sold me the suitcase said he’d been keeping a journal since his first traveling.
Unfortunately, all the notebooks up to 2022 (which was roughly 50-75 notebooks, filled with my handwriting) have been lost. About half when I couldn’t pay for a storage unit, and about half a decade ago when they were stored in a friend’s barn and then we had a falling out and he pretended to not remember my storing them there.
But yeah. It helps me think to journal stuff out. So even though 90% of my journal entries are lost, it was still valuable to do.
I just really wish I could read my entries from early twenties and understand my own state of mind then.
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.
You should be able to smell a female plant in full (oily) bloom. I’ve read that smell is one of the problems that illegal farms/grow box owners have when tyring to stay undetected.
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.
I don’t question your friend’s ability to smell cockroaches, but I gotta tell you, there is no restaurant without them. The best you can do is minimize.
Roaches go where there’s food. That’s just a fact of life.
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 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.
Libraries are havens for unhoused people. They don’t have to pay to sit in the air conditioning and read a book.
If we were a society about helping people we would have just installed showers at the libraries ages ago.
I work at a library and they wouldn’t let us install them when we built a new building. We do though have a place nearby that lets people clean up but not stay there.
Same, but I’m starting to think you need a pretty sizable infestation in a nearby wall for this to be a thing.
Bedbugs smell worse than roaches. Roaches will make me leave a place. Bedbugs make me run in terror.
I refuse to find this out.
Best way to get rid of bedbugs is by turning your house into a temporary sauna. Ensuring everywhere reaches some 50º Celsius will kill all the little fuckers.
No anime conventions for you unless you wear a gas mask!
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.
I’ve never actually been to an anime convention and had no idea how common anime fans with poor hygiene actually existing was until I read some of the horror stories when this was posted before.
I would guess it’s just related to teenagers getting body odors and not knowing yet that they have to deal with them.
Maybe, but I don’t remember everyone stinking when I was a teen. Or teenagers in general stinking any more than anyone else now.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chemicals-teen-body-odor-chemistry
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.
Thanks high testosterone bro. Your comment made me remember when I was 18ish and would not drink soda, barely eat sugar, wake up to do exercises on the bedroom floor… That was my prime and for a reason. I’ll try to go by next month reducing my sugar intake at least and do pushups when I wake up, start challenging myself again.
Take it or leave it but my advice (sometimes I take it sometimes I’m a hypocrite) but tomorrow never comes. Fuck next month. There is no reason for you to wait to eat less sugar. If it’s a matter of finances, get a head of romaine lettuce and some carrots and much away for a few days. Feel the sugar withdrawal as your body freaks out wondering what has changed and starts realigning those neurons. After a few days of that, a generic slice of sandwich bread will taste like cake. Use that wasted $30 of high sugar snacks and food as motivation to stop eating this poison. If it’s purely a waste issue, find the first homeless person you see and give them a big bag of high sugar food. Even if its frozen meals they’ll give them to their buddies and use the microwaves at a convenience store and eat like kings for day.
Honestly, a big part of this comment was me talking to myself, but not about sugar. But if it helps you, I’m happy.
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.
Oh yeah me as well. I can also smell when someone has a disease. I know cancer or at least the type my grandmother had but some of them I have no idea what is wrong with them. I can also differentiate different kinds of drugs.
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.
I have a good sense of smell but…that sounds more like cripplingly good
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:
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.
Removed by mod
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.
Yeah, I can see a place smelling like a public swimming pool being off-putting. 10% bleach is really common across the food industry, though. Making bread, jerky, kombucha, and various grains, each facility had the same bleach concentration for cleaning (among other cleaning and sanitizing solutions).
This is exactly the kind of BS I’m talking about. I once knew some pool lifeguards that had to rotate through bathroom cleaning duty. I overheard that their MO was to just get everything wet with a hose, splash pinesol on the floor, and call it a day.
Depending upon the formula of Lysol, that’s actually worse than not doing anything.
We’ve got a brand called Lyzol and that seems to be the same formula as Lysol, before it got regulated in the US. If this were to be sprayed, I’d consider the area poisoned.
Lyzol
This contains some chemical that lingers even if you wash the floor with water afterwards and slowly produces volatile compounds, and stays for > a week. This gives me (and a few other people on quora) a headache. Again, from reports on quora, the smelly substance also tends to jump onto one’s hand, on touching the surface, making it disastrous for cooking.
Nowadays, I use Dettol disinfectant liquid, which stops smelling after about 1/2 hour of wind.
Removed by mod
This is basically evey kitchen I’ve worked in. The pine sol can be substituted or more commonly mixed with other detergents.
In some areas (depends on local health dept.) restaurant kitchens are required to have weak bleach solutions around for sanitizing food prep surfaces.
Bro, bleach is literally how you are supposed to sanitize restaurant surfaces. This thread is wild.
Agreed! But “smells like cleanser” does not mean “is clean”. It jams up my radar (sense of smell) so it’s tough to figure out if anything else is up. I’d rather detect no off odors or cleansers at all to be sure.
Or they’re the cleanest places you’ve never eaten in.
Yeah this entire thread is filled with people who think they have superpowers but failing basic logic.
That’s entirely possible. The problem is that with chlorine or ammonia vapors savaging your nasal cavity, you’ll never really know.
I’ve tried to push through in these situations and it’s never good.
Well put.
Just wanted to point out when an odor is pleasant it’s an aroma.
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 can smell roaches and bedbugs. One is annoying. The second will cause me to flee a building in horror.
I’ve also informed several friends that they were pregnant. They never believe me the first time.
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.
Do you have a journal?
I do. Been keeping a journal since 2000 when I made my first entry on a plane to europe, because the guy who sold me the suitcase said he’d been keeping a journal since his first traveling.
Unfortunately, all the notebooks up to 2022 (which was roughly 50-75 notebooks, filled with my handwriting) have been lost. About half when I couldn’t pay for a storage unit, and about half a decade ago when they were stored in a friend’s barn and then we had a falling out and he pretended to not remember my storing them there.
But yeah. It helps me think to journal stuff out. So even though 90% of my journal entries are lost, it was still valuable to do.
I just really wish I could read my entries from early twenties and understand my own state of mind then.
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.
You should be able to smell a female plant in full (oily) bloom. I’ve read that smell is one of the problems that illegal farms/grow box owners have when tyring to stay undetected.
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 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.
I have to counter that in my experience most, if not all smells travel 15m. When the wind is right that increases massively.
I thought everyone could. Is that something only some people can smell as well?
Roaches do have a smell. Yuck. Ants though? There are so many different kinds of them, I can’t smell them, or I haven’t noticed if so.
My lunatic ex had a nose like a bloodhound. He could smell anything.
I don’t question your friend’s ability to smell cockroaches, but I gotta tell you, there is no restaurant without them. The best you can do is minimize.
Roaches go where there’s food. That’s just a fact of life.