Formaldehyde & Febreeze: Not Quite a Fairy Tale

I got into my car feeling sort of excited this morning. I have been rotating through the 3 new CDs I received for Christmas (2 from Matthew (brother) and 1 from Maddie) and am currently on the French mix that Maddie so sweetly made for me. I've quickly become obsessed, absolutely and totally, with "M'en voulez-vous?" I love the kicky little refrain, the high notes she hits that I can sometimes also get (at least it sounds right in my head, but who knows), everything. As I do not have a CD player in my room I mostly just listen to it in the car, hence the excitement.

I had my arms full with my LSAT logic games book, my phone counseling materials (a huge stack of papers--which should be bound but isn't--inside a legal pad on which I make more "doodles" and drawings than actual notes...oops), my tea, and wonderful purse (which held a bottle of water, a diet coke--we don't have any regular--wallet which still smells of cologne from mystery source, sunglasses, regular glasses (both sets of glasses in cases), small scraps of paper with reminders on them (see previous blog entry), gift cards, band-aids, lip gloss, chapstick, pens, highliter, pencil and eraser, bunch of business cards, etc etc etc), so opening the door was a bit of chore. I managed to get inside my car, not spill my tea, relieve my arms of their terrible load and get the key in the ignition. I closed the door, turned up the volume, put the car in reverse and then it hit me: my car smells like formaldehyde.

I am extremely familiar with the smell of formaldehyde. I spent numerous semesters cutting up fetal pigs, sheep's brains and eyes, fish, frogs, worms, cats, sharks, and all other manner of [once-living] animals, etc. So when I first got the whiff my brain immediately conjured up the image of one of my pigs, lying tummy up on the biology dissection table, little chin stubble showing, tongue hanging out, and me, delicate lovely me, ripping open her (yes, we confirmed it was a female) rib cage (very easy to do. And oddly satisfying...I have issues).

I immediately put the car back into park and started looking for the culprit. Mind you I have a relatively clean car. I try not to keep too much crap in there, though lately I've always had more in the car than I'm able to carry in my arms. So I flung aside a little jacket, a pair of sneakers, a pair of heels (because you never know when you'll need stilettos), the strap to one of my handbags, a coffee carrier from Starbucks (it was completely unnecessary and I feel obliged to recycle it. Damn "green" movement), a bag full of Tupperware (Brianna finally made me take it) and found another bag. Inside it was a banana. This banana was rather brown but not too squishy. I figured it had been well preserved since it's been freezing lately (gooooooooooo winter!). But the damn thing had started to smell and apparently aging banana smells like formaldehyde.

This sort of surprised me. Brianna and I would buy banana's sometimes and when they started to get a little past their prime we'd shove them in the freezer to use to make banana bread at some later date (she always made the banana bread. I just don't seem to have an interest in making it, only eating it). These bananas, to the best of my memory, never smelled like dissection to me. In fact, I don't really remember them smelling at all. I decided that I had spent too much time pondering this smelly banana and finally opened my car door and flung it out into the yard, thinking some squirrel or bird or groundhog might enjoy it as a bizarre winter treat. It seems, however, that even once you've removed the source of the smell, the smell itself continues to linger.

I drove all the way to work (a whole 20 minutes) trying to sing this lovely French song (I get most of the words, but inevitably trip all over them when attempting to sing them in succession and it comes out as completely garbled crap until the refrain of "whooa oooh oooh oooh oh, m'en voulez-vous ous ous, woah oh oh oh oh oh"...complicated stuff), trying to not breathe in too much. I rolled down my window for about 30 seconds, hoping to disperse the smell to the outside world, which immediately caused my ears to feel as though they were in danger of getting frostbite. And so I suffered through the smell, wishing I had some Vick's to put under my nose as I did back in the day. Oh well.

I suppose I should be thankful that it's not July with its days and nights of sweltering heat, sure to destroy anything left in your car with the windows up. But with it being so cold, and the forecast for the day being rain and/or snow, I could not leave the windows down to try to let the smell escape. And so I sit here, with an hour and a half left of work, anticipating the smell of dead fetal pigs and sheep's brains. What a fabulous way to end my day! Maybe I should buy some Febreeze...