Perfume

Extremely polite people make me anxious. I wonder what horrible unspoken thing they're waltzing around. Also: I want to crawl out of my skin whenever corporate people lead off by telling me what I did right. The other shoe will surely drop after the pro forma stroking. And I've already explained how effusive people never, ever stick around. I shudder whenever anyone starts flattering my wonderfulness, having a long history of making out infinitely better with those who deem me merely marginally tolerable.

By the same token, perfume and cologne repel me. It's not that I dislike strong aromas. It's because my attention is iexorably drawn to the underlying stink. Something about such fragrances hyper-attunes my nostrils to body odor. I suppose it's a result of three things: 1. my contrarian impulse to always resist misdirection, 2. too many stays in cheap motels where powerful deodorizers only marginally masked the atrocities requiring them (and the horror of gradually becoming aware of the masking's dissipation), and 3. this, which I still haven't managed to flip, except in fits and starts.