SuperSenses!

I have a Super Power. It's not anything fancy, nothing that will save the world from Alien destruction or help us achieve our quest for World Peace, but it definitely has its advantages. Keeping it a secret is unnecessary so I will tell you: I have a really super keen sense of smell.

My step-dad used to say if someone farted in Mexico I would complain about it. This is a bit of an embellishment but it illustrates how much envy (irritation?) my super sense has garnered over the years. And luckily my sense of smell has not diminished as I have aged since it comes in handy multiple times a day. Take today for example. I microwaved some popcorn at work. As everybody knows, microwaving popcorn is a real delicate operation. Three seconds too long and a huge section of the middle is burnt. But stop it 2 seconds too soon and half the bag is unpopped kernels. Okay so maybe this isn't a big deal to SOME people but it is to me. Luckily, my nose will tell me the precise moment a single kernel starts to blacken and I can hurl myself at the stop button and come away with a perfectly popped snack. I mean, that's pretty handy, don't you think?

I can also walk into the house and know from the front door if the baby has a dirty diaper. Tom will have spent the entire afternoon with her completely unaware and within a nanosecond I'm yelling "baby pooped!" Or "Something in the fridge is rotten!" or "Our neighbor didn't shower today." Okay not that last one.

If you lived with me you'd probably start to find this a bit annoying. But believe me, sometimes this super sense can be a real curse. Like when Tom eats this God-awful turkey chili from a can, which smells like a bowl of salted barf, I can't be in the same room with him or stand to kiss him for, like, a week. And I can't walk by the Starbucks storefront downtown that, for some reason, the entire homeless population likes to use as their outdoor urinal because the stench literally assaults me. I have to go all the way to the next Starbucks, around the corner.

Also, to make absolutely sure I don't get a big head about my sniffer, fate has bestowed upon me atrocious eyesight. That way things are evened out. Luckily I was born in the latter half of the previous century in which contact lenses were invented. (Can I just point out how creepy it is to say I was born in the previous century?) If I had been born a couple hundred years ago my parents would have had to leave me out on a hillside to get eaten by wolves, because I wouldn't have been able to FIND the field that needed to be tended, let alone tend it. Actually, no, by the time they discovered how bad my eyesight was I would have wandered under the wheels of a carriage and saved them the trouble. Even the first half of the twentieth century wouldn't have been any good. Sure, I would have had a better chance of basic survival but it wouldn't have been much of a life, since I would have been that chick sitting in a corner with glasses the thickness of a phone book, my eyes magnified twenty times, making me look perpetually half-witted. Certainly nobody would have been inclined to procreate with me, not even on a bet.

Speaking of which, all of this leads me to wonder what I have or have not bestowed upon my 13 month old daughter. Evidence thus far would seem to indicate she has no sense of smell, since she is perfectly content to cart around a load of odoriferous nastiness for however long it takes one of us grownups to notice it and do something about it. Which, for now, is definitely on the "blessing" side of things because with both of us constantly bitching about the stench Tom would go out of his mind. But hopefully as she grows older her sense of smell will improve, because burnt popcorn can ruin your whole day.