Good luck getting that out of your head.

Of course, you could always listen to Girl From Ipanema.

So I read in a magazine that one way to ease stress in your life is to turn off the computer or TV an hour and a half before bedtime.  This resonated with me because how many times have I been on my computer at 9 or 9:30 and thought to myself, “This would be a great time to wash my face, brush, floss, stretch and get into bed for 30 minutes of reading and going to sleep so I can get up early and meditate?”

And I don’t close my computer or do any of those things and then it’s 11 and there’s no way I’m getting up early to meditate now.

So I’ve been trying it.  It’s nice.  I definitely am enjoying The Omnivore’s Dilemma’s much more when I read more than one page at a time.  The downside is that I don’t blog as much.

You know when I want to blog the most?  When I can’t.  When I’m driving or waiting at the DPS (though Twitter helps with those), but especially when I’m biking.  I’ve been riding my bike to work about 3 days a week and I love it.  I notice the headwind but don’t let it control me because it’s irrelevant. The route I take means that if it’s windy, half my trip will be pleasant and half of it will be slower.  And there’s something about biking as transportation vs. biking as leisure that makes heat/rain/wind just part of the journey and not THE MOST GIANT NUISANCE EVER.

And it’s definitely more enjoyable since I’ve found my Shuffle and have uploaded NPR’s Most E-mailed Stories Podcast to it.  A girl needs her fix!

One thing that I have been wanting to blog about is a smell I’ve noticed for about 10 years.  As far as I know no one has described it, or if they have I haven’t come across it.

I first remember noticing it about 10 years ago when I was a camp counselor.  I was hiking along and smelled the most delicious woodsy aroma.  I followed my nose but eventually became convinced it had no source.  And I could only smell it on the hottest of days and fairly deep in the woods.  It wasn’t like freshly cut cedar after the rain or sweet mesquite on a breeze, but something earthier and unidentifiable.

It was the smells of summer, sex, heat and nature all rolled into one.  I say sex because the smell was so stimulating and sensual that it belongs in the same category.  Not so much as an aphrodesiac but as something that heightens all of your senses.  Also because to me it smells masculine and intimate, like the smell of a man’s skin after a shower but before the deodorant and cologne.

I tried to tell people about it, but how do you share with someone a smell that you can’t locate or describe or whose existence you can’t predict?  I eventually decided that it was the smell of leaves and foresty-floor stuff decomposing and for whatever reason I found it pleasing to the nose.  Not sexy, I know. Or maybe it was an animal giving off its mating pheromone and I wasn’t supposed to smell it but I did?  Sorry, Bambi.

Anyway, I’ve smelled it on occasion since then and I think I’ve even been with people and asked, “Do you smell that?  Right there!  That!  Do you smell it?”  And either they didn’t and were humoring me by saying yes, even though they were NOT weak-kneed and gripping the nearest tree saying, “Oh my GOD why has no one bottled this scent??” Or they did and weren’t biologically wired to appreciate it like I apparently am.

Relevance?  I smell it when I’m riding my bike, even though there’s no forest. I no longer care what it is or if anyone else can smell it, I just enjoy it and try to inhale it with all of my pores, (who start coughing and spitting when I inhale OTHER smells from the bayou, but that’s another post).  And even though I say I don’t care what it’s made of, that’s not going to stop me from attempting to recreate it at Naked.