i am neurotic.

I can’t eat my food without smelling it first. Before each and every bite, I have a strong urge to take a whiff. To avoid the awkward, “are you smelling your food?” comment I get from some, I pretend to see something in the distance while I hold the bite by my mouth in smelling distance.

You know how you can sometimes smell a familiar but misplaced aroma? Like maybe the smell of bacon while you’re out driving in the country? Every time that happens to me, I think that I’m really in a coma lying in a hospital bed and the aromas that I smell are really the result of the doctors waving the source of that particular smell under my nose in order to get some type of reaction to prove that I’m still alive.

Whenever I have something from another country in my possession (my mom had old Russian magazines, my fiancee gave me a Claddagh ring from Ireland) I feel compelled to smell the item because it makes me feel like I have experienced a country in which I have never been. For example, when I smelled the Russian magazines, I felt I knew what people in Russia smell every day. Now, I know what it smells like in Russia.

i have the need to smell the dental floss each time i pull it out from between my teeth. sometimes when other people are around, i have to turn my back in case they catch me sniffing the floss, because i can’t just floss without sniffing.