Yesterday we went to Casper to look at flooring, and we did not get back until very late. So I’m posting now for yesterday’s FTT.
It was a great trip. We had lunch at the Fire Rock Cafe–the food excellent, the service obsequious. While waiting for our food, I suddenly thought to myself that I need to stay alert for the FTT–who knows what might happen on a trip! And at that exact moment, Jacinta commented, “You need to be on the watch for the FTT–you never know what will happen.”
Eerie. How does she do that?
A clue came later in the evening as we dined with friends. Our friends had invited over some other friends, a deacon and his wife, and the conversation turned to why people in Wal-Mart look so strange. The deacon’s wife, Ruthie, had a complete account of the Wal-Mart people, and it begins with sweaty shirts: some scientists did this study, see, in which they had a bunch of men work out and get sweaty, and then they took the sweaty shirts and had a bunch of women smell them. Normal women, explained Ruthie, could smell the phonemes in the shirt.
At this point, confused about how these otherwise normal women could smell the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language, I suggested that Ruthie meant “pheromones.” Ruthie admitted that this was probably the right word, and went on to explain how women who were using contraception couldn’t smell the phonemes at all. This meant that their choice of men was completely thrown off, because they went for men with the wrong phonemes for their genetic make-up.
I don’t know exactly how that gets us to the Wal-Mart people, that secretive bunch that never comes out in daylight in Wyoming except in Wal-Mart and at the tattoo shop, but it did set me to thinking about Jacinta’s ability to read my mind. What if I signal my thoughts by way of masculine pheromones? What if, having been married to me for so long, Jacinta can actually smell what I’m thinking before I let off a single phoneme? It’s an intriguing possibility.
I wonder if it works better when I’m sweaty.
