the actual fact is that i create almost no body odour because i create almost no hair. i know how this works, but it's the hair that acts as the petri dish.

i've mentioned here repeatedly that i've never grown chest hair - which is strange because the male relatives on both sides are quite hairy. my maternal grandmother is scandinavian on her mother's side (and irish on her father's side), which is at least somewhat of an explanation, but it's a bit of a distance - and while it's not exactly a scientifically valid analysis regarding chest hair genes, my mother is very dark-haired and would more readily pass as saami than swedish, which throws that much more of a wrench into the distance. i have that one norse ancestor, far back, my grandmother's grandfather. my grandmother actually told me the other day that her own old finnish grandmother had a rather asiatic phenotype, which i find somewhat intriguing given that my father is rumoured to have had some cree in him; as i may be siberian on both sides, there's a chance i could show up with a plurality of "asian" genes. my mom actually looks more native american than my father did, but it's apparently from a laplander source, and not from some obscured affair out in saskatchewan, in my grandmother's youth...

so, if the reason i have no chest hair is from a distant collection of genes passed on down to me on the female side from my great-grandmother's father, so be it. it's an empirical question, certainly. i'm skeptical.

i used to grow pit hair, but it's been down to almost nothing for years. i can go five or six months without needing to shave them, and what does come in is very scattered and faint. this is certainly hormonal, because there was hair there at one point, for sure. but it means that i don't get that heavy stench. that said, there's a caveat: i'm in good shape. i was biking fairly strenuously today, and i barely broke a sweat, so i was just left with a faint odour of lady speedstick when i got my jacket off. if my pits are going to stink it's more likely to be from humidity, and then they kind of pick up the smell in the air.

no. the smell that's been bothering me when i came in isn't from exercise. it's from a toxic mixture of car exhaust, cigarette smoke, natural gas furnaces and other local pollutants. it's the air quality. it's the pollution.