If every one of us gets only one super power, I certainly drew one of the shorter sticks. Some people are blessed with amazing athletic ability, some people with brains or wit as sharp as a garrote, or smashing good looks… Me? I have a super sense of smell. It may sound cool, but I can tell you it’s a double edged sword. I can smell a meal and tell you with 90% accuracy everything in it. I’m also debilitatingly susceptible to body odors, smelly feet, and rogue farts. It has some fun applications — I can tell when someone enters the room, and I can follow people with my eyes closed (providing there are no scent-less obstacles in my way), good food is that much more enjoyable for me — but for the most part it is more of a problem than a blessing. After all, there are many more bad smells in the world than good ones.

So that brings us to the title — the sea of citrus, udon and cheese — that’s what I’ve been swimming in all day. Or at least it smelled that way. In my 4-year old class — already my most difficult class — one of my students puked all over the place. The instant it came out I could smell exactly what he had eaten and drank for lunch… made all that more powerful after having stewed in his stomach acids for 4 hours… It was unbearable. And the smell just spread everywhere, to every corner of the plaza our school is in. Our eyes teared, our noses ran, and the rest of the day was just hell.

I suppose one thing I can be thankful for is that it’s the dead of winter now, and not the sweltering, humid Fukui summer…

The smell won’t go away, even now. I can smell it on my suit, in my hair, in the mucus membrane of my sinus cavity. I’m poisoned, and all I can do is wait until my tainted skin cells shed in a few weeks and leave me with a fresh coat. Man, and I just got my hair cut, too!