There is something to be said for not knowing yourself. The lesser-touted quality of self-unawareness has its benefits. For example, if I was less hyper-aware (and less a product of parents with Too Many Degrees), I’d probably be a bit happier. I won’t say ‘ignorance is bliss’ for fear of throwing too many cliches at you too early into this post, but as long as I know you’re thinking it…..

Which brings me to say, I’ve noticed a pattern in my New York life. I can tell when I’m upset about something or too rundown or too hyped up because it manifests in my kitchen. The place of so much joy for me and others becomes a direct representation of what’s happening in my heart. The word I’m looking for is fester.

I am a tidy person. My house is clean and things have their place. I don’t ordinarily let dishes sit in the sink overnight, with the exception of a pan or two that I can justify soaking. But when I’m having a hard go, cereal bowls and water glasses are allowed to percolate in that aluminum rectangle for days on end. Once I realized this pattern, it began to be a reason in itself to be upset or put-upon. I imagined the scum covering my forks and spoons sliming over my head as well. My brain sponge smelled like mildew. My spinal drain was clogged. (This, I discovered, is how cycles begin. And I don’t mean wash cycles.)

I won’t bore you with tales of recent life difficulties — mainly because they’re the same ones as before — but I will tell you my dishes aren’t getting washed. One pan lately reached a full six days in my sink. I relay this information not to disgust you or embarrass my parents, but to express the full amount of stress inflicted by last week. Just so you know what I’m dealing with.

There’s something almost flagrant about a pile of dirty dishes sitting there, staring saucily at me as I drag around the house, getting ready for the next draining day. It’s offensive. The nerve those knives have! It feels like a jeering crowd reminding me of all the things I didn’t finish.

One great side effect of having a direct dish-to-emotion metaphor is that I’ve noticed it goes both ways. If I’m having a bad day and I do my dishes before I fall asleep, I feel better. It perks me up. And so, a year and a half into our journey, I’ve learned not to blame the forks and spoons but to view them as an impartial barometer for my mood.

After all, it’s not the flatware’s fault.

There are many things I have in common with Martha Stewart, the most legitimate of which is that both our names start with the letter M. One other thing, however, is our affection for spring cleaning.

When I spend a whole dusty day crawling under tables and dusting behind books (only Martha and I think to do that, you know), there’s nothing better than ordering dinner in and throwing open my windows to the Astoria sunset for a big breath of fragrant air and a satisfied smirk.

It’s taken me a little longer this year to get around to cleaning. My tally so far shows that my junk has outperformed me. I did manage to donate three pairs of shoes and to drop some old sneakers off at Niketown to be shredded and made into rubber tracks. Those two acts have kept myself self-satisfied for weeks now. But other tasks remain… I plan to create a full budget for my expenses, and wallpaper and paint a bookcase, and throw out the half-scribbled notebooks I’ve been keeping since graduate school. I’ll recycle the notebooks of course, to be shredded and made into that new material that goes around the lead on pencils. Those pencils will inevitably write on notebooks and voila, we’ve arrived at the most meta circumstance my brain can handle. I am a woman comforted that the world is round.

Anyone who’s watching this season of The Real Housewives of New York will know that one of the characters/women/fembots, Ramona, has been shoving the phrase “renew” down our throats since Episode One. (Her recently-revealed skincare line, funny enough, incorporates the word. Saucy minx.) I’m not sure if it’s all the dust motes settling or too much Bravo television, but I’ve been inspired to renew too.

But then last week I read a terrible thing, in a terrible magazine (it was either Self or Selfless or Shape or Shapeless. Cosmopolitan or Gin ‘n Tonic or Maxim or Minum, strange I can’t remember the name…). It was an article that advised women to choose one thing to improve and forget the rest. And to paraphrase the most insidious part — “Your brain is only wired for so much self-control. You’ll be more successful if you focus on one thing, such as saving money or losing weight or staying in better touch with friends, than if you spread your brain’s energy among all those things.”

The moment I read that, all my willpower went downhill. (It landed at the base of the hill and staggered into a nearby bar where it feasted on unattainable men and nachos.) The months I’ve spent using only half of each facial cleansing cloth per night to be less wasteful led to purchasing too-expensive eye cream that smells like plastic. My microwave soup made way for street-cart tacos. I didn’t call or email any of the four people I’d scheduled to be in touch with last week.

But, luckily, I spent most of today watching Martha and painting flowerpots. (Not the most pressing need, but it was on the list, ok?) And it’s Sunday. Which means there’s a whole new week to come, and I can start redoing my renewing.

I am a 24-year-old woman from one of the most rural places East of the Mississippi, trying to make my way in one of the most unforgiving professions at one of the most difficult times in recent history. I, who was named Miss Peach by the opposing basketball teams in high school because I always helped their players up, displaying an amount of wisdom appropriate to my years, decided to specialize in business reporting. I now work in one of the most cutthroat fields, at one of the fastest, most competitive news organizations and for one of the most rapid-fire, go-with-your-gut, take-no-prisoners teams.

In short, I’m a fish so far out of water, I’ve evolved.

It is in this atmosphere that I had a small revelation. (A small one, proportionate to the amount of my brain cells that fire on all cylinders. Some have even taken to firing on trapezoids. Or each other.) The revelation came after I read a press release that detailed a CEO’s salary. It was impressive. I glumly remarked to my team, “Man, I should have been a CEO.” Someone responded, “I bet you will be.”

Smoothly sidling past the idea that someone fewer than five years out of college should be lamenting her lost career choices, I was surprised by the confidence shown by my coworker. He thought I had the potential to be in charge of a whole company.

And that’s when I realized that’s exactly what I want to do. (Along with the bakery and humor columns and small-town tour playing ragtime piano, of course.) I want to be in charge of something.

The concept of building a career is fairly new to me and that’s not just because I’ve never done it before. I’ve existed at my current job for exactly one year tomorrow, and done it happily (enough) because I worked on being the best headliner I could. Now that I’ve decided I want to lead… something… I have to make some decisions based on their effect on my future. I don’t think I have the éclat (or the estomago, to make this a three-language sentence) to really play that game, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Roger Altman, former deputy Treasury secretary and chairman of Evercore Partners said, “Hyper-competitiveness is not an unalloyed good.” I agree with him. (And it’s not an un-alkali-ed good either.) My style of management — which orbits around teamness to the utmost — clangs a little against the iron bars of today’s capitalist competition. I vote in favor of loyalty, honesty, fairness, transparency. It hurts my feelings when coworkers have goals like individual success or personal wealth on higher pedestals.

But perhaps these antiquated notions of being a team are just other items to add to my list of ways I’m dissimilar from my peers. And maybe that’s why I’d make great management.

Every time I go to Bloomingdale’s — which until I moved to New York was never, but now that I work in an adjacent building is often — salespeople ask me where I’m from. I say New York, as they inevitably haven’t heard of Blue-Grass-right-on-the-Virginia-West-Virginia-line. They open their eyes wide, say “Wow!” and tell me I look very European.

I’m flattered, though I am adult enough to know this is not true. I do not look European. I look vaguely Scotch-Irish (freckles) and Jewish-ish (dark hair, prominent nose). I don’t have the spark of Spanish girls or the grandeur of a French femme. I don’t smolder like Brazilians. No, my face reads the same melting pot mishmash of most Americans. Which is why I get angry when salespeople say this to me — because it works. I inevitably giggle, blush, thank them and then listen very closely to what they have to say.

So far I have minimized the damage to my wallet by this flattery. I only spent $52.38 on my trip to the store today. I got the candle I intended to buy and a jar of very expensive hand cream. You know how people bring out the nice silver when company comes? Well, I’m going to bring out this hand cream. It’s the classiest thing I own.

One of the reasons why being told I look European works is that it enables me, even for just a moment, to imagine that I’m not myself. I’m not the girl who once sat directly in a fresh cow pie, I’m someone else. Someone with more money, which is the whole point of the exercise. I doubt Amparo, the lovely woman at the Hanae Mori counter who schnookered me into my purchase today, considered how much her approach affects me.

When I got home from the adventure, I did something practically anyone with internet access does — I googled myself.

But I wasn’t looking for entries about me, I was searching for girls living My Alternate Life. Other Molly Seltzers. What they looked like, what they did, why we were similar and different.

I’ve found two of them. Both have facebook friended me at some point or another over the past few years. One Molly was a student at UPenn, a year or two behind me. We look vaguely alike. She even wrote an article for her student newspaper. She spent a few months traveling in Europe and seems to have some great parties, particularly at Halloween.

The other Molly is more interesting to think about. She graduates from high school this spring and is planning to attend Clemson. She’s from Northern Virginia, the place where suburbia became supra-burbia. Molly also happens to be a blonde-haired, brown-browed Tea Leoni lookalike.

She describes herself as liking various things, such as showers, running, broccoli and banana peppers. In the same medium, I profess my affection for: sea monsters, infomercials and the Pittsburgh Pirates. You can see why I enjoy contemplating my alternate life as the fleet-footed, vegetable-consuming teenager who roots for teams that win. And I do get some kind of pleasure from imagining the ways our various Molly lives might be entwined.

The more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realize that I’m not angry when salespeople tell me I look like someone who I’m not. I’m just sad when the visions come to an end.

Today’s rain is the cold kind. Today’s wind is the blow-open-your-coat-and-drive-straight-up-your-sleeve type. All day, people made weather-related wisecracks. I never heard such groups for blaming their own grouchiness on a little hydration.

I love rain. I like the soft, wispy drizzly kind you find in Scotland and the Pacific Northwest. It hangs in the air and forms drops on the top of your hair. Sometimes it feels heavy to breathe, but I love it because it’s the perfect weather for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I can remember several very special days when I was able to take a long walk in weather like that and come home to something warm and filling.

I like the wild storms and the sideways sleet and hail balls. When I was 6 or 7, a period marked by the fact that I wouldn’t wear pants, my father used to convince me to sit on our blue porch swing during summer thunderstorms. Our pond water reflected the lightning and we could see white streaks above the hill across the road. I remember the goosebumps and my mom arriving to sit on the other side of me and keep me warm while we rocked and we all felt very in awe of the world around us. Moments of fearsome earth always remind me how impressive early humans were.

That was the setting for one of the interesting moments of my life. It was many years later, a few summers ago, when my dad and I were sitting on the swing during a brewing storm.

“How do you think you would have interpreted thunder if you lived a thousand years ago,” he asked, drawing air through the mild, woody cigars my mother and I love with a small pwah sound.
“Well, I would have had to associate it with something I knew through personal experience, right? And thunder sounds like a giant stomach grumbling. So I would have thought the gods were hungry,” I said. “I’d make a big feast to give them.”
My father paused for a pwah. Then two.
“I would have interpreted it as a sign of aggression and started a war on someone.”
Another silence.
“Yours was a very feminine reading,” he said, as the first raindrops began to splatter.

I think rainy weather has always been the source of my affection for cities like London and Seattle. I’ve been drawn to them for as long as I can remember and it’s not for the colonialism or fish. Part of it is the calming affect of rain. I like that it quiets the city — not like snow, which stifles. Rain makes the noises of a thousand neighbors softer, but adds a slight rhythm of its own. I like the fresh smell and the way it washes the sidewalks clean. I like knowing plants are being sated.

But mostly, I like coming inside while it’s raining. It appeals to all my homiest instincts — an opportunity to burn a candle, read a book and enjoy the quiet company of friends with some kind of simple, tasty meal. (Likely a carbohydrate.)

I am comforted by the idea that wherever you are, even if it’s not raining, because you’re reading this, you’re inside, warm and safe.

Now that temperatures in New York are tiptoeing towards a tentative 70 degrees, I am tempted to pack away my winter accessories. I will keep a few scarves to wear during the summer, so my separation with neckwear won’t be too difficult. Hats mash my bangs, happy to be rid of them. Which brings us to…. gloves.

I have never liked things on my hands. Most of my mitten memories involve getting wisps of wool in my mouth while I tried to eat snowballs. I bought a pair of fancy Italian leather gloves during college and stained them irreparably with sloshed coffee. They didn’t really fit correctly anyway. The palms were too loose and the fingers too short. The seams were too… seamy. The cuffs too wrinkly. Whoever created the phrase ‘fits like a glove’ must have been a professional wrist model because none of the ones in my life, well, did.

August
I visit anthropologie.com to buy some wedding gifts. Now. I bet you know at least one woman who is not-secretly obsessed with this store. The prices are Himalaya-high, but those designs…. ahh. I am lost for words. I don’t know how that store knows what I’ll like (since I have rather eclectic taste), but it does. From the mismatched kitchenware to the floral bedding and silky shirt-dresses, they know me. During my last visit I even found that they sold the perfume I wrote about a few weeks ago. Now they know my scent as well! It’s incredible.

So. The web site glowed before me. I couldn’t resist the urge to use my browser to, well, browse. And there they were. White leather scrolled with beautiful floral design and green vines. Lined with cashmere.

More than $100. I snapped my laptop shut.

Early October

For two months, the gloves haunt me. They are fantastic, but so expensive and fancy. I’m not sure my heart or hands are in it. I try to be rational. I don’t even wear gloves.That’s too much money to spend on an accessory anyway, especially something I may not use. But there they are, little sugar plum fairies for my fingers. Dancing, dancing…

Late October

After trips to three different Anthopologie stores, I discover the gloves are only sold online. This is problematic because they’re sold in sizes, and I don’t know if my hands were medium or large. (Society always finds a way to remind you that you’re not XXS, even if you’re just measuring your knuckles.) I decide to buy both sizes and return the pair that don’t fit. With enormous anticipation of gratification, I enter my credit card number. The feeling lasts until I get an email saying the gloves are backordered.

December
They arrive! I consider tying a pink balloon to my mailbox. They are beautiful. And I am a perfect medium! They are beautiful. The gloves go with everything I own and best of all — they go with me. I quickly pack the larger pair, mail them back, square myself with my bank account and hit the streets. Life is beautiful…. until I lose them.

I know.

February
They must have fallen out of my purse somewhere between the subway and my office. (Or some thief is walking around with the most beautifully covered sticky fingers.) In my pain and rage, I try to buy another pair online. They are sold out. I re-visit all three Anthropologie stores. No luck. I mass-email my friends, telling with minimal tears the story of my wonderful lost gloves.

And finally, one gritty day, someone finds a pair in a small basket under a stack of clothing in one of the stores. They are purchased for me, and I gladly repay my friend, not even wincing when I realize I’ve spent 6 months and more than $200 on these gloves….

March

Now that we’re inching away from winter, I find that I’ll miss wearing my gorgeous gloves. But I’m glad to know they’re safely packed away until the next time it snows. Life is far less stressful when the only thing on my fingers is polish.

Everyone likes to talk about themselves, writers more than anybody. There’s something satisfying about describing the painful process of shoveling through the thoughts in your mind, flinging handfuls of sludge over your shoulder and hoping nothing good flies out with it.

Maybe it’s just because writers like to talk more period. (Talk in the sense of communicate — some of the very finest writers were mouth-shy. One of the best craftsmen I know stutters when he has to speak to an answering machine.)

New York has forced me to refine my tendencies to speech and silence. I natter less and glower more. I’m also more aware of the efficiencies — and deficiencies — of it all.

My work requires that I be on a conference call (which I secretly refer to as The Neverending Gory) with anywhere between 10-15 people, every day. For eight straight hours. We have a very high pressure job that’s time sensitive down to the hundredth of a second and a non-stop buzzing of noise in both ears that can’t be tuned out or you’ll miss critical information. The amount of chatter and our intense focuses occasionally lead to someone’s (my) joke falling flat or a question (mine) being unanswered. This is a very unusual situation. Imagine having 10 bosses monitoring you constantly and never knowing if they would answer when you asked an important question.

As a humor writer, I have some of the instincts of a stand-up comic. When I make a noise and I hear silence, something in my heart breaks off and goes tinkling to the floor. Being ignored at work (if you can call it that because everyone has a legitimate reason to focus on something else) has taught me to speak only when it’s really necessary. I’m less myself, but it makes everyone else’s life easier.

I called a girl last Sunday. We used to be best friends until we had a falling out my last year of college. In the four years we haven’t spoken, I got a Master’s degree and my first live-in boyfriend. She started teaching ninth-grade algebra at a school for inner-city Boston kids returning to class after dropping out, having babies or any number of disruptive things.

She’d deleted my phone number (I’m ignoring that, having kept hers all this time), so I had to identify myself when she picked up. I used my first and last name, to the person who helped me zip my fat-suit Halloween costume two years in a row. At that moment, more words were strange.

We recited paragraphs of our lives back and forth, taking turns, cracking innocuous jokes — the kind you’d tell your dentist or tax lady — and it felt a little stiff until the end, when I had to go.

“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry too.”
“Things have really changed for me, especially since I got to New York, and I really miss you and I think you should be part of my life again.”

She was silent.

“I’d like to be friends again, if that’s ok with you.”
“That’s ok,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yeah…. I’m sorry, you have to give me a second.”

She was silently crying.

When we hung up, we used our names, full first, not our old nicknames, but not our last names either. Fewer words were better.

2010. The year of the wedding. At least for me. Rapidly approaching three years of post-college life has apparently scared my friends straight… into marriage. I know this is the first wave (I can’t seem to stop using war terminology when I talk about this) and more will come, but I yearn for the lull between.

The art of the wedding gift, similar to the knack of composing the perfect greeting card, is an area in which I consider myself fairly expert. My two rules: never buy something on the registry and never get anything new.

I haven’t always been fond of the antique. When I was 14, I chided my parents for their mismatched house decor. (You may feel more sympathetic if you saw the sousaphone hanging above our fire-engine red leather couch.) My exasperated mother asked just what I would like to change and after a few moments of thought, I exclaimed, “Well, at least have matching dishtowels!”

I can’t figure what changed between then and now, but in my own house, I’ve taken a more relaxed approach to decorating. And the other day, I looked around and noticed most of my favorite items are old. I have a 1956 Underwood typewriter that I adore, despite the fact that it hasn’t technically worked in a few months. (A user error — I loaded the tape incorrectly and now every two letters, it falls below the keystrokes. I’m sure it can be fixed, just not by an engineer like myself.)

Many of my books are old, including the 1962 Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor. The record collection I’ve built is mainly of my parents old vinyls. My mother contributed Blood, Sweat and Tears and Joe Cocker and my father let me have his Cruising ‘58 as long as I swore to give it back someday. (This column is also about the pleasure of possession.)

Yesterday I met a friend at the Brooklyn Flea, which is a three-story amalgamation of young t-shirt designers who all try to look like Elvis Costello and batty hoarders selling broken costume jewelry. I like flea markets and antique fairs, though I can never find a happy medium between haggling the seller until I feel guilty and being ripped off completely. I spent about $200 on two beautiful pieces of art, one of which I believe I’ll give to a pair of friends who are going to be married in November.

If I were getting married, I would want gifts like a washer and dryer, or other expensive houseware items. The rest I’d like to be fun pieces that reflect me and the person who gives them. I think this is much more meaningful than that set of stemware from Williams Sonoma. (But what do I know…. I drink out of something that half resembles a sippy cup.)

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I do believe that something of yourself remains in the objects you use. When you buy a new cooking pot, you must first season it or the things you make taste bland. They lack depth and personality. But once you’ve used the pot for a few years, you build a relationship with it and you trust each other and the end result is a better collaboration than something new and sterile could have produced. (That and you ought to have learned to cook better during all that time.)

The one thing I’d hesitate to buy used — wedding rings. I love the idea of an old piece that’s been worn before, but I fear the other marriage’s problems would come along with the diamonds.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m not the groom in any of these weddings, just an attendee who comes bringing great gifts.

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton knew what he was talking about. (With that many names, you’d have to, or else nobody’d get past the first syllable.) His phrase “the quiet simplicity of exquisite neatness,” while referring I believe to a gentleman’s clothing, has earned its merit in my life. Or as he may have spelled it, lyfe.

For a full week I have been lying on the couch, drinking Koolaid spiked with so much Emergen-C, it’s the texture of wet concrete. Coughing, moaning, sneezing, dribbling, shuffling, croaking. (Not THAT kind of croaking. Still here to blog, thanks.) During that week I have also begun playing a game called “Test the Cockroaches.” It consists of me, in my helpless state, leaving things on the floor for days and fearing the appearance of a roach but never mustering the energy to clean up.

I’m not a messy person. I’ve raised a few dust bunnies, but I really run a pretty tight ship. My friends always compliment me on the status of my home. And only one of my skirts has a soup stain on it. (It’s paisley, you can’t even tell!)

Nevertheless, I do live in New York. In an apartment building. And though I’m clean, I did have my first roach experience over the summer. I was eating watermelon and watching television. I left the rind sitting on a paper towel on my floor while the program finished. Shortly thereafter, my cat, James, started acting very strangely. (Which isn’t noteworthy for either of us, but well, stranger than normal…) I saw a black cockroach dart out from under the couch and onto the watermelon. James and I leapt in unison, him towards the exoskeletonic threat, me from it. I skittered into my bedroom. Then I laughed at myself, grabbed a shoe and went back. No roach in sight. Fearing to sit on the couch again, I cleaned things up and got ready for bed. James was still lurking near the couch but seemed quite frustrated at having no sign of the bug.

There was nothing left to do. I took a deep breath. I stood in the doorway of my own living room, James curled around my feet. I said, “Roach. I don’t want to hurt you. You can do whatever you want in my house, as long as I don’t see you and you don’t scare me. If that happens, I’m going to try to kill you. Ok? So keep to yourself and I won’t seek you out.” It’s the same speech I’ve been giving spiders since I was 12.

I turned on my heel and went to bed. A few hours later, I was awakened by James thumping around in the other room. I sat up, flicked on the light, sprang to the window and threw open the sash! I saw the roach zoom from the living room into the hallway and then into my bedroom. James was frantically swiping at it, while it hid in the dark space created by the door’s shadow. I got up, grabbed a shoe and together, James herded it towards me and I smashed it.

I know that it’s pretty impossible to live in New York, no matter how clean you are, and not have a few cockroaches. But in my current sick state, frankly, I’m not sure I have the energy to survive another. Edward George and his exquisite neatness be damned.

I don’t know where I pick up some of my habits. I suppose many of them are pop-culture parasites left in my skull like ticks under a sock. Others I consciously borrowed from my parents, heroes, cool kids. I even got a favored phrase, “Who, I?!” from Petticoat Junction.

Just goes to show.

One habit I’ve never been able to trace is one that has also been the subject of many conversations. Each time I get serious about a man I’m seeing, I buy a new perfume. The idea is to have a scent associated exclusively with him (and by proxy, that period in my life). I’ve done this as long as I can recall. It seems strange to many people, but to me, it’s a way of consciously setting myself up to remember.

Occasionally I take the fellow with me to choose the perfume. And actually, to be honest, sometimes it’s a lotion or a scented soap. Once I chose a wax balm. (Wouldn’t recommend it. The fragrance didn’t linger, and neither did he.)

I can feel you starting to judge me. You see this as some kind of bizarre reliance on a man, a sort of nasal-born separation anxiety. It isn’t. But I admit finding a perfume when I’m single is a bit trickier. I never know whether I should buy the one that smells like me or the one that smells like the person I want to be.

Walking into the perfume section of department stores must feel something like what Kipling experienced in his first boat ride down some jungle river. The sights, the noises, the smells, the ticking and chugging of the brain suddenly palpable… the scene overwhelms. And I assure you, no tribe of hostile natives could be ever more intimidating than an army of shiny-shoed Bloomingdale’s sales clerks, all bent on wringing your last dollar from you. And, as they expected, you will spend it lustily on a bottle of Vitamin C Pre-Liner Primer Tonic for the Eyelids.

I went on scent mission today, looking for a solid perfume for several upcoming trips. Solid perfumes come in small jars with screw tops, and they’re great for taking on airplanes. They feel like a thicker version of honey, and as I was instructed, all you have to do is dab a dot onto your “pulse points,” wherever they are. (I stared at my particular sales clerk, thinking I must have left mine at home today…)

After an hour standing at a white counter with Janis (who does not appreciate Joplin and does not know any song lyrics and does not want to talk about it), I was convinced that choosing between 30 different scents would throw anyone into an identity crisis. I liked tuberose, but it reminded me of the word tuberous. Wild orange smelled like cider on winter nights, but also like a grandmother. My neck hurt from craning to sniff. I kept dropping the thousands of white paper strips that Janis handed me after spraying them with something I just had to try. Dazed and blurry, I clutched the counter for support. Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing here? And more importantly, what smell expresses me?

I settled on a beautiful round jar comprised of bergamot, gardenia, iris and white musk. Still not sure exactly what that says about my personality, but I’m fully convinced that any man would be lucky to catch a whiff.