Skunk: a study of human adaptation

Friday night, I am sitting on my bed in my room. I have my laptop on my lap. Outside my bedroom, I hear dogs barking like crazy. Strange, but I don't feel like looking up from the screen so I just turn up the volume on my television, which is playing NCAA basketball.

My roomate, B, screams in the kitchen. Then I smell something odd in my room. I cannot identify it. It is horrible. It finally motivates me to get out into the hallway of the apartment. I see B, M, and T scrambling out of the kitchen.

"It is not a raccoon," says M. "It is a skunk!"

"That is what I meant," says B. "Oh my. I think I am going to pass out. The kitchen is complete contaminated."

Some dogs must have cornered a skunk outside the kitchen window. And the smell wafted through the apartment. B and I find as many candles as we can. We light them in hopes that it would burn off the skunk scent. In the meanwhile, all of us gather in the living room, the one room that seems to be the least effected. We laugh because it was truly a ridiculous situation.

C seems to be immune to the scent. She is a pathologist, and has encountered much worse in her life. She tells us stories, about the worst scents she had encountered in her medical career. We cringe and giggle as she stands in the foyer acting out the "nursing home" incident. "....think about it. If you smell the skunk that means the skunk molecules are touching the sensors in your nose." We cannot stop laughing

But then she says something profound. "Don't worry. We will soon become accustomed to the smell. We probably already absorbed it. Only everyone else is going to think we smell like skunk."

Maybe it is not profound to you, but I had just experienced a pretty horrible week at school and it was profound to me. You see earlier that week my advisor had pulled me and another student into his office. He claimed that our slow graduation rate was disappointing. He had to let our favorite postdoc go because he is obligated to pay for us and we were basically taking that money from him. I had spent the whole week feeling horrible about myself. I thought about being a failure; I doubted my ability to do science; I spent the whole week flagulating myself.

My advisor was my life's skunk smell. Over the years, he had spent much of his passive aggressive energy telling me I was not good enough. To his credit, it is his version of motivation and pressure. Perhaps, he knows no other way to manage people. But that is not the point. I had let his negativity permeate my thoughts. And I projected it to the people around me. They wondered why I was so hard on myself. If I kept thinking I was bad, I will start to screw up in self-fulfilling prophecy. I needed to break this cycle and instead of getting used to being pushed down, start to fight back.

So now I have to start lighting candles for my life. Start to get rid of this negative stuff. It will take a while (our apartment still has the faint odor of skunk), but with enough airing out it should work.