I took a shower this morningish (it was before noon, so still morning, right?), which is unusual. Since beginning the freelance lifestyle I’ve opted to move bathing to nightish and spend a lot of time luxuriating in the bathtub while listening to audiobooks. Lately I’ve been listening to When She Woke by Hillary Jordan, a disturbing book on many levels not the least of which is the criminals being called “Chromes.” I’ve been called Chromes since college. So yeah, weird.

But this isn’t a story about my hygiene as much as you’d like it to be. No, this is story about how I must spend most of my life either being kind of reeky or neutral smelling and how when I change that my brain thinks I’m being haunted.

See, I showered this morningish because I had a lunch meeting with a potential new client (that went really swell thankyouverymuch) and for reasons unknown I decided to perfume myself. I’m fancy that way. Well, it wasn’t actual perfume but some perfume-scented powder (Estee Lauder’s Beautiful if you must know). I smell good.

In fact, I smell so good that whenever I catch a whiff of myself the reptilian parts of my brain notice something wrong and my autonomic system immediately panics thinking first that someone else is in the house. That smell is coming from inside the house! Then the autonomic system quickly dismisses that cockamamie theory and then decides that it’s a ghost. Yes, a good-smelling ghost is my second go-to option. It’s not until my actual brain engages that I go to “hey, that’s me. I smell good.”

This is sixty-three kinds of sad. I promise not to list them all for you. I’m sure you can figure them out but if you can’t, I’ll get you started: one is that I even wrote about this.

This post was NOT sponsored by Estee Lauder’s Beautiful or Estee Lauder or anyone beisdes my ass, but wouldn’t it have been awesome if it was sponsored by Estee Lauder? Or Nutter Butters?