Possibly the dopiest paragraph in WaPo today — from "Marie Kondo has advice for living and working at home in a pandemic."
I have almost no sense of smell, so the emphasis on smelling the right thing annoys me. And I read it right after this other smell-and-coronavirus offering from WaPo: "What it’s like to suffer from the coronavirus’s weirdest symptom."
"I could literally bite into an onion like it was an apple. And there was just nothing there. It was just absolutely bizarre."... They settled in for a joyless 10 days of putting food in their mouths and then swallowing it — "eating" would be the wrong word for it, because eating is a pleasure. This was mechanical. [She] bothered with it less and less. "There was no point,” she says. “Even if I had a craving for something and I had that item right in front of me, there was no satisfying it because we couldn’t taste it."Jeez. All right. Have a little pity on the people who have this experience all the time, and you have my sympathy for your coronavirus. Stay alive. I mean, really, who cares about "weird" right now? But I guess it's a struggle for the newspapers to keep writing news stories when nobody's out there doing anything, and everything must be about coronavirus, including the fulfillment of the craving for fluff (which tastes like marshmallow, to those who have a sense of smell-taste).
What can we say of the brains of those afflicted with a lack of smell? Unaffected? Unrelaxed?
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22 comments:
I'm currently living in the Philippines. It is hard for me to generate much sympathy for the woman who can't enjoy her food because she's lost her sense of smell. Three weeks into a lockdown here and many of my neighbors are going hungry. The choice between eating food they can't smell or starving would be an easy one for them I am sure.
Not all smells are "joyful", I've come across many that are intrusive, overwhelming, and joyless and joy killing. It would be strange to not be able to smell, and especially discouraging if it was a sense that was lost.
A lot of these articles you post and examine are written from a selfish perspective, as if the writer cannot imagine someone would have a different experience than their own.
I have always had very poor eyesight, so all this happy talk about Ted Williams and some astronauts having 20/15 or even 20/10 vision really annoys me.
stevew said ... "A lot of these articles you post and examine are written from a selfish perspective, as if the writer cannot imagine someone would have a different experience than their own."
i.e, written by a New Yorker or DC insider.
Marie Kondo's husband really lucked out. She's cute, knows how to clean and cook, and her stupid little hobby is raking in billions of ¥.
"John Mac said...
I'm currently living in the Philippines. "
Just curious, if you don't mind me asking, what do you do there?
I have almost no sense of smell, so the emphasis on smelling the right thing annoys me.
@Althouse, you are in good company. There is anecdotal evidence that Caravaggio also had anosmia, and he got annoyed enough to assault a man, and later to commit murder. Anosmia is a symptom of cadmium poisoning, and Caravaggio ground his own paints.
"eating" would be the wrong word for it,
"Eating" is the right word for eating.
I mean, really, who cares about "weird" right now?
People who are bored with the nonstop WuCooties fear porn.
Just keep in mind that lack of sense of smell is one of the symptoms....
After radiation treatments, my senses of taste and smell were out of whack for weeks. It was interesting to experience brief bouts of cyclical recurrence as damaged cells tried to replicate in those body parts and then died instead.
It wasn't ever as bad as no taste/no smell at all, but I vividly recall literally everything tasting like a mouthful of pennies. Gross.
OTOH, I also vividly recall smelling everything during first trimester pregnancies. I honestly think that was worse. In those pre-social-distancing days, I stood in line at a grocery store behind someone who was a smoker and it was all I could do not to heave, and I had the same reaction when I was in line behind someone holding a cup of coffee! That was a traumatic day, just the smell of coffee making me sick! Thank goodness that was a temporary super-power.
Stupid Marie Kondo. Spraying essential oils in the air. Where does she think those oil droplets land? On surfaces. Where they make things sticky and attract dirt. @@
"smelling everything during first trimester pregnancies."
My spouse was very sensitive to smell when she was pregnant. Once, and only once, I made popcorn. She was out at the time, but returned shortly afterwards. She got a good whiff and proceeded directly to the bathroom to vomit. I was very cautious about producing odiferous foods after that.
"Possibly the dopiest paragraph in WaPo today"
Oh Ann, sweet sweet Ann, are you fucking kidding me? This is the Washington Post you're talking about. There have to be a dozen paragraphs that are dopier. You can start in the opinion piece, "Undocumented immigrants, essential to the U.S. economy, deserve federal help too."
A lot of us men envy Meade, he can pass wind at will, just has to do it quietly or when Ann's out of earshot.
The incense clock. An ancient way to keep time before European mechanical clocks spread around the globe. Different times of the day would be marked by a different perfectly calibrated incense. Fantastic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incense_clock
You just aren't fabulous enough!
I kinda like Kondo, even though she is cray-cray. She sparks joy. ;-)
mockturtle at 8:36...
That's almost haiku!
My husband loves truffles. Because I try to be a good wife, I keep a little bottle of truffle oil in the pantry for him. Because he actually IS a good husband, he doesn't use it unless I'm not around... because if he puts ONE DROP on his eggs or whatever, I can smell it across the house.
On the other hand, I had a great-uncle who had anosmia; by all accounts, he was a very unhappy man, and very thin.
My grandfather had no sense of smell for many years, and one day he was acting a fool chasing his new young wife around the house and she accidentally kicked him in the nose with her heel and his sense of smell came came back.
That's how they told it in the family anyway.
People with no legs probably have a similar reaction when they read about your morning jogs.
I'm with you on your take on Trump.
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