All my posts should be prefaced with:

"The following is my subjective opinion. Accuracy or truth relative to other's subjective opinions may vary. In fact, you might think I'm full of it."

On that note, then...I am unusually sensitive to scent, for a human. I find, upon reflection, that I have allowed scent, a sense which more or less bypasses the frontal lobes and goes straight to the limbic system, to be the decisive factor in many of the life changing decisions I've made in my time. Uh-oh, that isn't very rational, and it's oh-so important for me to entertain the notion that I, an aspie, am a logical, rational person who can put emotions aside and looks at a situation objectively. Sigh...it is what it is, and I am what I am.

As with many ideas which are known to be erroneous, it's easy to find examples and justifications to support the idea that scent=truth.
I'm not yet prepared to throw the validity of scent out the window, though...not yet. Scent means too much to me.

There was the time I took an immediate and strong aversion to a young man because he smelled aggressive and dangerous to me. Others said he was a nice young man...I knew better. I gave him a wide berth and avoided him as much as possible. Within a month or two, he was dead, apparently due to overdosing on drugs. Did I smell the drugs, on some subconcious level? I'll never know. I'm sort of glad I never had to find out more about him.

There was another guy I avoided due to scent. His scent made me feel almost ill. I don't know why he smelled that way, but he really smelled bad to me. It was an extremely unusual odor..not like B.O. or anything, just..odd, very strong, and very unnatural. A chemical smell.

Young men tend to have a distinctive musky odor, particularly teenagers. It raises all my panic buttons. I don't know why. I avoided them. They smelled too...potent.

People who just aren't taking care of themselves at all usually have that sort of an odor about them. It's a combination of cat spray, decay, not washing often enough, stale urine and dirty house. At first, it seems cruel to avoid someone for smelling like that, but serious neglect of personal needs and cleanliness is a sign of mental instability, so....again, makes sense.

Cheap cigarettes: good tobacco smells bad enough. Cheap ones? Ew.

Boozy + unwashed: dangerous. Potential violence, rape, or worse. Avoid if possible, placate and escape ASAP if avoidance is not an option.

Female perfumes really, really bug me. I encountered a person like this a day or two ago. Her scent got all over me. I couldn't avoid that. As soon as I could, I tried to wash it off. I scrubbed all the way up to my elbows, four times, and the smell was still there. Then it was time for lunch, and every time I brought the food to my mouth, I felt like gagging. I was finally, thank goodness, able to get it off completely by the next day.

Candy sweet female perfumes are just sticky and icky. But they're not as bad as the ones that smell like bedroom. You know, the ones that nearly shout "Screw ME!"? Uh, girls? I don't want to smell that. Not really. Save it for your partner. In your bedroom. Keep it in your bedroom. Please, please, please.

Thankfully, most people don't provoke such marked reactions from me. I don't know if I could endure social interaction if they did. It brings to mind some interesting questions about whether some autistics have an even better sense of smell, and whether that is why they don't want to be touched or approached by most people. For me though, 80% of people are merely interesting and intriguing to smell. I'm glad for that.

Synesthaesia

As promised: I certainly don't experience synesthaesia the way Daniel Tammet does, but I think I have traces of it. Examples:

When I was a child, I saw numbers as though they were arranged like a deck of cards extending infinitely into space. The positive numbers ascended slightly while the negative numbers descended. In other words, try to picture a number line where instead of a line with dots, you have numbers written on cards, the cards overlap, and they are on a continuous, infinite incline. The cards were transparent, I couldn't really see the card, just the numbers, which, by the way, were all transparent black. To add, I had to mentally move up the line, and the number that was the answer would be larger, bigger, sort of like a card pulled up out of a deck or from a hand of cards. The multiples of ten were bigger. When I counted aloud, my voice would build in expectation every time I neared a multiple of ten, like kids do when they're playing hide and seek and are nearing the count of twenty, only for me, it was every multiple of ten, not just twenty.

Time to me is a circle graph. Each year is a circle, and it is joined to the year before it on January first, so that all the years together are like a continuous spiral extending back to the time when I was born, at which point the spiral tapers down and becomes tiny before it vanishes. The end of it, where I will die, will be torn off roughly rather than tapering smoothly as the beginning did. Each circle or year progresses in a counter clockwise fashion. The seasons are deliniated by an X. The top quarter is winter, composed of December, January, and February. The left quarter is spring: March, April, and May. The bottom quarter is summer; June, July, August, while the right hand quarter is fall; September, October, November. Holidays and birthdays flash like little lights in the months as I visualize them. The spiral is compressed most of the time, except when I am thinking of a time or trying to remember when some event happened. Then the spiral stretches out and I work back progressively until I find the circle I need.

Time as in daily time is also a circle graph, but not what you might expect. I will have to draw it and post an image of it here for it to make sense. All 24 hours are in one circle, and they aren't evenly divided. This may be why I allocate time differently than other people. Some parts of the day feel much longer and more expansive to me than others even though I know that they are really all the same length.

I sometimes visualize scent.

And textures often have sounds to me, especially squeaky, disagreeable sounds. For example, cotton balls, frosted glass, and certain fabrics all feel horrible and sound excruciating to me.

In order to do math, I more or less have to visualize the numbers moving around, and I think this is why I have so much trouble with algebra, especially if I don't understand *why* the numbers are moving or when they can or can't move.

Drifting off the topic of synesthaesia now, certain sensory experiences are simply heavenly to me. Smelling a certain scent, seeing a certain shade of a color, feeling the wind blow against my face, hair, or body, the sound of the wind. I love wind. And I can't explain it at all, but the people who smell the best to me, smell like wind feels or looks.