Last night (Thursday) a gentleman took it upon himself to invite the 400 people in our class over to his house for a party. He had a huge, great deck that overlooked a small park. I only made it there by 5:30 (I was on a long mission to get a free printer. Long story short (ironically, this might be the interesting story of the blog) I got there and back on 4 buses; twas free using expired bus cards, wandered around after getting off at the end-of-the-line, not knowing most of the streets I needed to get to this house, besides for their tiny street. And I knew it was by a pool and I could picture the map.) expecting it to be dead (as the party started at 2pm after class) but it was far from. I spent the evening talking to a lot of people (no, all 400 didn't come. At most it was 60 at a time, with a constant ebb and flow), most whom I'd never seen before, and always impressed by the individuals I met. I may have touched on this before, but it's a pretty uncanny and unique experience to be at a large gathering of people who look like typical drunk douchers, but are in fact ALL intelligent and, in most cases, well-rounded, well-traveled, interesting, and cool. It's almost creepy. There was generous, in all senses of the word, boozing going on. The host collected donations to order pizza and about 45 minutes later, 20 large Domino's pizzas arrived (Domino's being the only pizza chain round here and large being same or even smaller than 'Merican medium) and they were completely consumed within 5 minutes.
Anyway, today was a regular-kind-of day, lots of lectures and whatnot and then reading at the park and internetting away. Usual Friday night for me.
Things in the house are going semi-alright. I'm getting a bit discouraged by the messiness of my housemates. I think they haven't really lived alone -ever- and so are not used to being considerate. In short, I end up washing a lot of dishes and cleaning the stoves and counters and picking up garbage, literally, off the floor.
One night it was so gross that I lost my appetite upon entering the kitchen and proceeded to not eat dinner as opposed to doing the usual amount of cooking, with flourish, that I love to do. Also, today my roommate's IceCream tub exploded (?) in the freezer, all over everyone's stuff. He didn't seem to mind, though, so we now have ice cream everywhere.Also, to add little (but many) insults to injury, we have a serious antfestation 'round here. It's pretty nasty as there are literally hundreds and some will crawl on your feet as your chopping your veggies.
Anyway
Jesus, I didn't know that!1
Not too much is known about the mysterious hormones known as pheromones, but we do know that they're important - more so than we consciously realize. For instance, if a bunch of babies are given the same outfit and then all the outfits are placed in a pile together, a mother will be able, without difficulty, to recognize her baby's scent in the clothes. Note: do not confuse pheromone smell with body odor; these are completely different. (Body odor is actually caused by bacteria eating the stuff that comes out of certain glands around your body. This stuff is odorless and it's the dying bacteria that give us the smell)
A more interesting case is when studying attractiveness with relation to smell. When participants are asked to choose or rank (no pun intended) clothes on a basis of olfactory-attractiveness, they will usually (subconsciously) pick ones that present chemicals indicative of being "different" from their own as opposed to the ones that smell like themselves or their family. This is evolutionarily based on the fact that when we're choosing partners, we want ones with different immune systems (antibodies and whatnot) from our own so our progeny will have the largest combination of antibodies and bet skillz for survival! Cool, huh?
2 comments:
I think that is a bit redundant - that's last bit about the evolution of body odor. It's quite easy to smell the difference between men and women.
Posing a question at you, since men and women, at least in my opinion, have different odors: are men and women biologically more/less immune to disease than the other?
I suppose that's contingent on my opinion stated above but it makes sense in my unintelligent and, in most cases, not well-rounded, poorly-traveled, uninteresting, and lame, almost creepy mind.
Nevertheless it's kinda funny that a women's pleasant smell is just the amount/combo of bacteria rotting away on her skin. Also thanks, I now know why it is that hours after a shower and no deodorant I stink under the arm.
Several things:
a) Body odor is NOT the same as the pheromones. These are more subtle and complex smells, coming from sex hormones (derivatives of androgen (-> testosterone) and estrogen) and in all areas of the body. Body odor is caused by proliferating bacteria on your apocrine sweat glands (these are glands found, mainly, on armpits and genital region and differ from normal exocrine sweat glands found everywhere) and their metabolizing of your sweat. That being said, we choose our companions based on body odor cuz we don't want a smelly bastard in our beds.
B)Pheremones themselves are not necessarily indicative of immunity; rather, they convey a mix of immunity agents, if you will, (good guys that act on our defense... antibodies, lymphocytes, monocytes, etc.) and so people choose different smells because it implies different immunity agents, ergo baby w/ super microbe-fighting power (all of this stuff is uncertain and the mechanisms is amazingly unknown). However, you do bring up an interesting point.
C) why women smell better? this can be a combination of many things, most I do not know. I think most of it is a social construct. They do try to smell better, after all.
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