(it's not you)

yes, this totally has to do with "I don't need to take any classes at this university that I cannot imagine would have any sort of impact upon me despite the fact that I chose to attend a university to get a university education, when all I really want is to learn this one specific thing"

Go for it, Abs. I would consider it, but we bought solar panels for the house for approximately the same price as the bed+mattress+drapes

My co-worker who got shingles told me enough about his symptoms that I unhesitatingly got the vaccine. It wasn't great but it wasn't exactly terrible, either...unlike shingles, which seems uniformly atrocious. No regrets at all.

And yes, I have trimmed the list down to only blood relations but I'm still annoyed on principle

Why, yes, I am dealing with Christmas cards, thanks for asking

To this very minute I still love 70s/80s Old Spice, which was my dad's jam. He would occasionally break out the English Leather...I'm pretty sure I remember he also had a bottle of Hai Karate 🙂

The 80s were an absolute wall of Polo at my school

Ha ha, to me it is the smell of the 70s, if combined with cigarette smoke

I loved original Cristalle (oakmoss, again) but when they reformulated I got hung up on Italian perfumery...I loved true carnation scents with that strong clove note, or true mushroom-y gardenias

My middle school classmates drowned themselves in Vanderbilt or Sand & Sable or Bonne Bell Skin musk, my high school classmates were all-in on Giorgio and other Big Aldehydes, by college everyone was wearing Body Shop Dewberry or White Musk. I got super interested in essential oils around then

Long story short, I learned early that I could tell the difference between real vanilla and not-real vanilla, between French and English lavenders, between oakmoss and trying-to-be-oakmoss. I didn't talk about it much because my friends couldn't tell the difference, and I sounded like a kook

Anyway, I probably annoyed the heck out of the ladies at the perfume counters. "This smells green, why is that?" "Oh, it's probably the galbanum," they'd say, and I'd go to the library and read about it. I was an odd child.

I learned that what I really loved was chypre by asking a lot of questions...this would have been the 70s, way pre-Internet. My grandmother wore L'Air du Temps. My mother wore Sweet Honesty, every other mom wore Charlie. So I guess I got pretty much the gamut of 70s mom scents