As there has been a pretty steady series of posts about Jared Loughner's massacre, I though I would pause for a post about something which seems irrational to me, and may gross out some readers. 

The other night I realized that I have a double standard where it comes to asparagus pee.

Many -- but by no means all of us -- who have eaten asparagus (which I love) are familiar with the characteristic smell that it often imparts to urine. This has long fascinated people; Benjamin Franklin called the odor disagreeable, while Proust thought it smelled like perfume:

Attempts to identify the compounds responsible for the odor date back to 1891, and observations extend beyond the world of science. Benjamin Franklin noted the "disagreeable odor" caused by a few stalks, while the French novelist Marcel Proust had a more amenable take on it: "As in a Shakespeare fairy-story transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume," according to the researchers.

I don't know that I'd go as far as Proust, but I have to admit that I enjoy the smell of asparagus pee. I would even go so far as to call it emotionally satisfying on a certain level.

But something that happened the other night startled me. After attending an event with many people present, I went into the men's room to do my business, in a urinal which happened to have not been flushed. No big deal there, as I really don't care about the contents of urinals, or even whether they've been flushed. But all of a sudden, there it was! That normally satisfying asparagus pee smell was wafting up into my nostrils... except it was not mine, for I had not eaten asparagus! But whoever the guy was who peed before certainly had. 

And much as I like the smell of my asparagus pee, I found myself intensely disliking the smell of another man's asparagus pee! I was feeling a sense of disgust in a normally pleasant smell simply because it was someone else's. I had not realized until that moment that my enjoyment of the smell is conditioned upon it being my own. This caught my attention because it struck me as irrational -- for according to simple logic if I like an odor I should always like that odor. 

Perhaps this means I am a odor hypocrite, or an antisocial misfit. I don't think this qualifies as full-blown urophobia, though, because I don't fear urine, nor do I have any particular revulsion to the smell of other people's urine. So why should a smell that I like when it's mine be disgusting when it's somebody else's? This is especially puzzling because if I am not grossed out by the smell of stranger's urine in the absence of asparagus, why would I be grossed out by a smell in strange urine that I like in my own?

I suspect that because the enjoyment of odors is an inherently irrational process, logical analysis is a pointless exercise in overanalysis. (In this case, overurinalysis.)

Who knows? In some quarters, this very post might be considered insane. And we can't have that, can we?  

IMPORTANT NOTE: It used to be believed that only some people had smelly urine after eating asparagus, but it now appears that while everyone puts out the odor, only 22% can smell it:

It was originally thought this was because some of the population digested asparagus differently from others, so that some people excreted odorous urine after eating asparagus, and others did not. However, in the 1980s three studies from France,^[27] China and Israel published results showing that producing odorous urine from asparagus was a universal human characteristic. The Israeli study found that from their 307 subjects all of those who could smell 'asparagus urine' could detect it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus, even if the person who produced it could not detect it himself.^[28] Thus, it is now believed that most people produce the odorous compounds after eating asparagus, but only about 22% of the population have the autosomal genes required to smell them.^[29][30][31]

Geez, if I hadn't written this post, I'd have never knew I was born that way.

Is that fair?

Shouldn't whether you smell something, and what you smell, be a choice you can control? 

Perhaps I should resent my non-inclusion in the asparagus-odor-blind majority.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Snowflakes from Hell (apparently not a 22%-er) for the link!