Superman has superhearing:
Today Superman's super-hearing - ordinary human hearing
multiplied countless thousands of times - enables Superman to
detect the footfall of an ant 1,000 miles away or trace the source of
sound waves across millions of miles of interstellar space.
Not to mention super-sight:
Superman possesses a wide range of optical super-powers,
including X-ray vision, which enables him to see through all
substances except lead; telescopic vision, which enables him to focus
on objects millions of miles away; super-vision, a combination of
X-ray vision and telescopic vision, which enables him to perform such
optical feats as peering through the wall of a house thousands of
miles away; microscopic vision, which enables him to examine the
tiniest atomic particles; heat vision, which enables him to apply
intense heat to any substance except lead; infrared vision, which
enables him to see objects lying outside the visible spectrum at its
red end; radar vision, a term denoting infrared vision used at low
power, which enables him to see in pitch darkness; and photographic
vision, which enables him to perform such feats as memorizing whole
books at a single glance.
Do you know which sense is never a superpower? Smell. And there's a reason. I should know, because I am in fact the Hero that nobody wants to be: The one with the superhuman sense of smell. I can't fly or paint the future or stop time, but I can detect the presence of cigarette smoke within a 20-mile radius. Hell, I can detect the presence of someone who once smoked a cigarette in 2004 or spent time in a smoky bar in 1998. And what's that perfume you're wearing? The one that's sitting exactly inside my nose relentlessly giving me a headache?
I was thinking about my SuperNose because there was a flood in a place where I spend a significant amount of time. When I first walked in there, I smelled something off. To me, it smelled like cat pee. I asked the others in this space, but they couldn't identify anything. Turned out it was a broken sewer pipe in the closet behind my desk. I was really so close with the cat pee.
I've also been thinking about it because it is the season of sunscreen, which seems uniformly to be made with odiferous chemicals that assault my nose all day. I hear that most people get used to these smells as the day goes along. Not happening for me. That means I get to choose between burning my fair skin to a crisp or being slightly nauseated all morning from sunscreen-stank. Great choice!
The one who really suffers in all of this is my husband, who enjoys smell in his life. He likes his laundry to smell, in his words, clean--which to him means Tide and Bounce. Well, I can also get behind Tide and Bounce, but only in the fragrance-free variety. Chip hasn't smelled clean to himself more or less since we got married.
The worst part is that it seems to be getting worse. My theory is that living in Prague--where I could sometimes detect the arrival of a colleague from several rooms away and learned to spend time on mass transit being a mouth breather--coated my respiratory system with a fine layer of pollution, making things a little more bearable from a smell standpoint. Now that I'm in Montana--and especially Livingston, where no air stays put long enough to get any kind of smell--that coating is gone and I'm at the mercy of the nose that only a bloodhound could love.
I wonder if I can buy noseplugs. How many looks do you think I would get if I just bought a pair of those nose clips that synchronized swimmers use? Could be worth a try.
