Banning perfume in restaurants?
In his online column yesterday, San Francisco Chronicle food writer Michael Bauer revists a topic he brought up last year: the restaurant experience is being ruined by other diners’ aggressive perfume or aftershave. For Mr Bauer, a trail of “jasmine and sandalwood” (mmm, jasmine and sandalwood) wafting by as he tries to savor his meal, is almost as bad as second-hand smoke. Bauer doesn’t call for an outright ban on fragrance in restaurants, he just asks people to be more considerate of others. (Look, the photo that accompanies his Feb. 2008 column shows those limited edition Molinards with the old-timey bulb atomizers… perhaps Mr Bauer caught a snootful of Habanita or Nirmala!)
The readers’ comments that are posted on his blog are stereotypical of so many issues: Ban perfume, I shouldn’t have to suffer… Don’t ban perfume, you can’t pad the world… I’m allergic to perfume and I deserve to eat in restaurants, too! … Only in San Francisco would they try to ban perfume… Ban children instead!… (And my favorite: a rant that blames the downfall of our society on egomaniacal social networking sites such as Twitter… because it leads to narcissistic perfume wearing, I guess. See, everything can be blamed on the Internet.)
I can certainly sympathize; I’ve been stuck next to some bad-perfume wearers myself. However, I think of perfume wearing as a grooming choice more than I liken it to smoking. Oh, how I wish we could ban people who don’t wash their hair or brush their teeth or use deodorant from restaurants every public place that I frequent. Believe me, people bug me plenty. But I just don’t think we can legislate this. It’s personal responsibility: You have the right to stink, but I also have the right to refuse to deal with you.
Those of us who are “into perfume”– we read about it, we blog about it, we obsess over rare and hard-to-find specimens, we seek it out near and far– we are *probably* not the same people who are bowling folks over with our clouds of noxious fumes. We think about what we wear. We know which fragrances have great sillage (that wafting trail, not necessarily a bad thing) and which stay close to the skin. True, we take risks with strange and just plain odd-ball fragrances (“Kölnisch Juchten smells like tar, isn’t it fabulous?!”) But we are not the target market for those hugely popular, hugely annoying fragrances put out by celebrities such as Celine Dion, which are the olfactory equivalent of a gaudy, scratchy, acrylic holiday sweater. Most of us talk about wearing perfume *for ourselves*, not to make an impression on a roomful of people. As a co-worker once said when I mentioned my perfume collection, “What perfume collection? You don’t wear perfume.” Oh yes, I do, every day.
Perhaps someone out there is offended by, say, my lovely En Passant, a gentle breeze of fresh lilac that stays close to me all day and doesn’t announce itself to the room. Perhaps someone is thinking, “How do I tell my poor co-worker that she smells like lilacs? Can’t we just ban perfume from the workplace?” In that case, I would advise handling it like any other grooming issue– either avoid that person; suck it up and deal with it; tell the person yourself; or have the boss do it on your behalf.
Talking about eating, bad smells, and co-workers… I have a few co-workers who microwave stuff that can’t possibly be food, at least not food for humans. So today I took my lunch outside to enjoy the gorgeous day and throw a few sunflower seeds to the birds. But someone was smoking andit was wafting straight at me. I couldn’t see who it was, so I couldn’t move out of range. Of course they have the right to smoke outdoors, and I sometimes even enjoy the smell of a just-lit ciggie-bite. Just not with my salad. I couldn’t help thinking that it was some sort of mild punishment for daring to think “Just suck it up and deal with it!” as a reaction to Michael Bauer’s column.
Buneez in da house, what you gonna do
deceptively sweet- looking bunny claims the sofa as his own
I have some rabbits. They live indoors, in big, tricked-out dog pens. I am the first to admit that this is something of a eye-sore that tends to overshadow, say, the sofa I had custom-upholstered in a lovely Ralph Lauren floral. (As my mother said: “Your condo used to be cute!”) Although I’ve always loved animals and grew up with dogs and cats, I didn’t set out to be someone who has 4 rabbits and their accompanying litter boxes right smack-dab in the middle of my living room.
It happened roughly like this: coworker gets her children some bunnies on a whim; bunnies make more bunnies; I take pity on overwhelmed coworker and think about taking a few of the babies off her hands (how hard can it be?); most of the babies die anyway, but I have already prepared– at least emotionally– for bunny ownership; and thus I head to the pound to get a bunny, and am told that they really do best in pairs, so I come home with 2 (spayed and neutered) bunnies and a loaner cage to tide me over until my 2-story, deluxe, handmade rabbit condo arrives from out of state.
Meanwhile I am devouring everything I can find about rabbits. The internet is packed with info from experienced rabbit people, including pleas from overwhelmed shelter and rescue volunteers that are sadly the same: “Our shelter is already full, and we just had 48 rabbits dumped on us from a backyard breeder. Can anyone help?” So off I go, back to the pound for 2 more (spayed and neutered) rabbits. How much more work could 2 eensy-weensy little bunnies be?
My first pair goes bonkers when they see the intruders. The male is spraying urine on anything in sight, including me, my curtains, and the new rabbits. In turn, the female chases him and humps his face. (Rabbits, included those who’ve been “fixed,” can have some serious hormone-driven dominance issues. I imagine their reasoning goes something like this: “Oh no, there’s a new girl bunny in the room, I’d better go hump my boyfriend’s face!”) Rows of tiny turds, perfectly aligned like the raisin-buttons on a gingerbread man, begin to appear around the house as various rabbits attempt to claim their territories.
In the interest of fairness, each bunny couple is then given the same identical exercise pen, furnished with the same litterboxes, cardboard cottages, chew toys, etc. The pens are set far enough apart to prevent spraying, scratching, biting, and boxing through the bars, but close enough that I can reach in and pet 4 heads with 2 hands. My home is duly rabbit-proofed with much elaborate jury-rigging, such as the clear acrylic barrier that runs around the base of my sofa beneath the skirt, installed after I heard a strange “boing-boing-boing” sound and found that a rabbit had tunneled into the guts of the sofa and was building a secret fort among the springs.
Rabbit domination complete; I am pwned.
