RPF, magic school bus and smells

December 15^th, 2011

            Alright, before we get to the RPF for this week I just wanted to say a little bit about my last post and the security situation here. Upon going back and rereading it as well as some people’s comments I just want everyone to be reassured that I feel totally safe in my site, I am well trained to keep myself safe and know how to do that. The Peace Corps has provided me with some excellent training when it comes to that and for that I am eternally grateful because it is skills that will always come in handy. While the security issue is still up in the air I will let you all know when I hear something but as I said I am very safe so there is no need to worry, however thank you for the love! And with that onto this week’s RPF, as in every RPF if I try to use logic it is most likely flawed.

            So, today as I was headed to Santa Rosa for my class on special education (why yes I did study special education for 4 years and do not need this class… so if you are wondering why I am in this class please refer to my blog post on Nov. 14^th) and on the bus I sat next to some fine young Honduran gentleman who just happened to be wearing a lot of cologne. This may just be my opinion but people in Honduras really overuse the cologne, why that is I have no idea but it can really start to affect someone when you are in a confined area for an extended period of time. Now I have never been a cologne guy in the first place and have never really used it so maybe I am biased against these young adults and do not know how much is appropriate to put on but I am thinking that I have a little bit of knowledge on the subject. Enough knowledge at least that I have acquired from living with Jobro (sorry for the call out Jobro! Twin love!) during his high school days when he went a little heavy on the cologne as anyone from my family can contest to. Anyways, as I sat next to this guys and bathed in the cologne (might not have been a bad thing for me since I probably smell, I am not really sure anymore) my mind began to think back to when I was a child and I remember an episode of “The Magic School Bus” with Mrs. Frizzle.

            Now in this specific episode, the class and their crazy teacher shrunk themselves and entered inside some ones nose and explored it since they were learning about smells that day. If my memory serves me correctly, and I believe it does, Mrs. Frizzle described how smelling works as follows: (1) our noses have receptors that are in all different shapes and sizes (2) smells around the world come in different shapes and sizes (3) when one of these smells enters into our noses the receptors match up with likewise smell shapes and sizes (4) this combination of smell shapes and sizes that are matched up in the receptors of our nose produce a certain message or smell to our brains. Now I am not sure if that is really what is happening scientifically or if that is how Mrs. Frizzle explained it, what I am sure about is that is the way that I remember learning it and I smell pretty good so it must be at least half way right.

            After my mind quickly processed through that memory I began to think what exactly makes a smell good or bad then? It seems to me that if that is in fact how our smelling works that our brain had to learn which smells were good and which smells were bad which seems very arbitrary to me. That also means that if you have a new baby you could potentially teach them to like “bad” smells and dislike “good” smells, so they would grow up to like the smell of sweaty gym socks and hate the smell of some fresh baked cookies. Why a parent would ever do that to a child I am not sure, nor am I sure of the process in which one would go about that. It also accorded to me that maybe different cultures in fact learn to like different “good” smells and dislike certain “bad” smells. Which in turn means that maybe, just maybe Hondurans have a different nose when it comes to cologne and they do not feel like the scent is as overpowering as it actually is (at least to my nose). So, if my presumably sound logic above holds true I wonder if I could train these Hondurans noses to detect just a little bit more of the cologne thus cutting down on the amount of cologne in the air during crowded bus rides and making myself just a little bit more comfortable. So I guess now you nose… (sorry terrible attempt with a pun and I am pretty sure it does not even work but sometimes ending these random thoughts are hard so that is gonna be the ending). Until next time!