sense? scent?

I couldn’t imagine our life without our senses.

With this, I don’t mean our common sense, I am talking about our senses literally, which is our sense of sight, smell, hearing and such…

I am someone who is not that ‘hearing-inclined’, until this day, I can’t understand a movie fully with the help of subtitles, I can’t understand the lyrics of a song until I read it, and I don’t pay attention orders which are given to me verbally… I remember better things in visual form...

Anyway, I would like to talk more about another sense, the sense of smell…

There are a lot of times where you associate a particular smell to a particular period of time or a particular happening…

A good example for illustrating this would be hair care products, I am sure over the years of using them, we will develop a particular liking for certain brands. As for me, I have developed a liking for hair styling products which are fragrance free, for fear of unpleasant odor assaulting my sniffer… Today, however, being lazy to take out my hair gel from my bag, I used some of my mum’s Wella hair gel, and memories of my secondary school days came flashing into my mind.

This is a typical morning of my Form 5 days,
‘oi, wake up lah, fatty….’
‘huh?ok…’
After a freezing cold bath, I would quickly get dressed and proceed to my parent’s room to apply hair gel…
This goes on almost everyday…

Apparently, my mother likes Wella hair gel very much, she has been an ardent supporter of this brand for at least five years already…

Another hair gel that would evoke memories is a particular type L’Oreal hair cream…

That was four years ago, I was just enrolled in the Early Entrance Program in MMU Melaka, being liberated from the shackles of home, everything was just so new and fresh to me… I would do so many things that I would normally wouldn’t think of doing at home, staying out late, have oily food for supper, reading on bed, using the hair dryer before going to school… And the hair gel I used that time was a L’Oreal…

So, whenever I caught scent of a L’Oreal hair cream, memories of my EEP days will come flashing into my mind, the late nights, the lewd jokes, the cultural shock of university life, the adaptation from Bahasa Melayu to English, the flexible timetable, the adaptation from class room to air conditioned lecture halls, the cheap and nice food of Melaka, Makohta Parade and etc…

It would be fair to say that those scents serve as a marker/indicator of the days I have been through as a human being… from a pimply, scrawny fifteen year old to an alcoholic embracing, more street wise twenty two year old young man…

However, judging by the way my hair ‘grows’, I’d better look for other scents as my indicator of life rather than hair care products, because by the age of thirty, I might not need any hair styling gel at all ‘cause by the time I’d be bald!!