What are your triggers?

In My Humble Opinion
41

The smell of water with heavy mineral content (esp. if it’s of a semi-volcanic origin) always brings me back to happy memories of staying with relatives in Iceland. There’s always a feeling of peacefulness and freedom that comes along with it, especially if the water is hot and steamy.

The smell of bay rum cologne always reminds me of my SO, who more or less has claimed it as a signature scent.

The smell of really heavily floral potpourri-type perfume-y scents (like a dusky rose or something) always remind me of this weird touch of memories about the church that my nursery school was attached to; the bathrooms had a sitting room just inside them and the place smelled of this godawful potpourri and had peach colored tissues. The soft focus of the memory makes it even weirder of a reaction.

42

Videki

Hello? This thing on?

Ok. The sound of a furnace starting late at night. Invokes a feeling that all is right with the world.

There’s a smell that I can’t identify, kind of a musty old smell, that I occasionally happen upon that brings me back to the opening of Star Wars.

Lilac (I think it is, cheap purple things) reminds me of mean old ladies. I hate when my wife or the house smells of lilac, and I’d destroy that bush in the backyard with malice aforethought if she’d let me.

The first few drops of rain on sage. There’s a dusty smell that usually gets washed away later in the storm. That smell triggers a feeling of relief, like I’m worried about the crops or some damn thing. Must be genetic because I’ve never farmed or ranched.

I know there are dozens of others, but I won’t remember them until the scent hits me.

43

Christmas – pretty much everything about it. The music, the lights and decorations everywhere, the cookies my mother used to make that I’ve taken over making, the children’s specials on TV, the ornaments from my childhood that I still have. It all gives me an incredible sense of deja vu about my childhood Christmases (one of the few good things about my childhood). It comes in surges, and when it passes I’m left with the realization that Christmas doesn’t have that magic any more, and it’s kind of a letdown.

44

Bad=spam I had a bowel obstruction when I was about 14. I ate Spam just before it got bad. The relationship trigger exists after 50 years. I can airmail from coming within 15 feet of it.
Good= clean Beagles.

45

You will leave my Lilac bush alone cranky. :smiley:

46

Sage is the smell of the holidays. My family would have turkey dinners for both Thanksgiving and Christmas and my mother would always make sage & giblet stuffing.

I had a good childhood and it brings me back.

The smell of hot asphalt always reminds me of trips to the Opryland amusement park (now closed). It was an annual summertime thing to always go see my Grandfather in Nashville. Every year we’d go to Opryland. It was always high summer and the asphalt that linked the park would be soft under your shoes and smelling of tar. Add a wiff of cigarette smoke for full effect.

47

I get the back-to-school nerves, too.

Pine needles and wood smoke. That’s camp, where we went for years when I was a kid and again as an adult.

And my wife’s hair.

Regards,
Shodan

48

It’s odd, there’s a particular restaurant I pass on my route from the office to Waterloo station that seems to give out a particular smell that takes me back to Africa. It’s not an African restaurant, nor any particular foodstuff, just a kind of woody barbecuey smell that immediately slams me back to my travelling days as I cycle past it.

49

I spent a lot of time traveling in Asia and now the smell of rice cooking just sends me. It’s very comforting.

When it’s been really stinking hot for a few days and then a big rain falls, when I step outside it smells just like Bali to me.

Every now and then I smell a whiff of a clove cigarettes and I feel transported to Indonesia.

Each of these things makes me smile!

50

Well, lets see, there’s the one on my Ruger GP-100 .357, one on my Mossberg 500 12-gauge pump, and my Parker VH 12-gauge side-by-side actually has two triggers, one for each barrel, and one on my Tippmann Custom 98 paintball marker…

…what?
:wink:

51

Whenever I hear Chad and Jeremy’s “Summer Song” on the oldies station, I get an immediate flashback.

That song was playing on the radio the day I lost my virginity.

52

Only, at that time, it wasn’t on the oldies station, it was on the Top 40 station? :wink: :cool:

53

I had a schlock of “Christian Highschool” friends over for a drinking session one night back when I was… 17 I guess. Anywho, this was a first for a couple of them, and by the crack of dawn one was snuggling the toilet, and another dangling her head in an icecream pail over the couch. My little brother nearly unloaded his bottle of Swiss Army colonge in the bathroom. And without taking pause to think about what I smell, I’ll question loudly “Anyone else smell vomit?” when Swiss Army comes around.

54

The song “When the Lights Go Down In the City”–or whatever it’s called. You know the one. The one that goes: “When the liiiights! Go dowwwn! In the citaaaaay! And the sun shines aaaaawn the plaaaaayne! I wanna go ho-oh-oome to my citaaaaay!” It always makes me think of my ex-boyfriend. One day, while completely sober, he managed to burst into an extremely drunken-sounding rendition of this song that had me both cracking up and singing along with it. It was hilarious and wonderful all at once. It’s also a rather bittersweet feeling currently as our break-up is still rather recent. :frowning:

Techno music makes me want to go out and take pictures of lots of things. The infamous “Blue” song especially. I’d explain the story behind this one, but it’s so patently strange the Internet would break from an overload of :dubious: smileys.

There was a particular brand of “good night”-scented shower gels that always make me think of anime, for some reason. Especially anime cats.

55

Freshman year, there was a girl who I had a really bad crush on in one of my classes. She was nice to me, but I was so ‘head over heels’ that I couldn’t see she was just being nice to me. I bought 4 tickets to an Alman Brothers concert out of my meager savings in the hopes that I could get up the nerve to ask her out. I did get up the nerve…and I asked her out. In retrospect, her laughter seemed so out of place. A radio was playing “Every Little Thing (She Does Is Magic)” by The Police for my long and humiliating walk home.

On the bright side, if I’m dead tired at the end of a work out, playing that song will piss me off enough to push on through.

56

The sound of dog-day cicadas – WEEEEEooo WEEEEEooo WEEEEEooo – trigger the same thing as the Back to School ads. In fact, my sisters and I call the dog-day cicadas “back-to-school bugs.”

The sound of a train in the distance – I grew up in a river valley with railroad tracks on both sides of the river. When I hear it at night, it envelopes me in a sense of wonderful, sleepy comfort.

57

When I was a kid, we had a jasmine bush climbing the back porch. I used to sit on the porch, reading, for hours and hours in the summer. Twenty years later and the smell of jasmine brings me back to that time: hot and lazy and not having to be anywhere or do anything else.

58

I was quite the smooth criminal for the first six months of 2004, my senior year/last semester of high school. My firsts kept on rolling out one after the other; first kiss, first oral, and first sex were pretty spaced out but as soon as that happened I had sex with my second ever partner and things just picked up exponentially from there. My whole senior year, I had been the subject of much female adoration and attention, and it took me a while to figure out what to do with it. By the time I had come into my own as a freewheeling sex machine, pleasurin’ and a-gettin’ pleasured, I was started college and I soon gained 30 pounds on a steady diet of pizza, rum and pot. It hasn’t been the same since.

Now it’s really hard for me to listen to the Postal Service, Everclear, Bad Religion or the Sneaker Pimps; those bands were a major part of the soundtrack to my life at that point. I’m overcome with sadness when I hear one of those songs I recognize from that time–the sadness of realizing at the time that I had blown so many chances at getting laid like a blanket by girls of all stripes (which was quickly alleviated by actually getting laid like a blanket), plus the sadness of my sudden fall from grace. More than anything, it’s the Postal Service and one particular song by the Sneaker Pimps (“Six Underground”); that was the playlist I listened to while getting ready for a day at the park tripping out with my favorite girl at the time, who singlehandedly cured me of my fear of intimacy and especially of being touched, and later gave me my first kiss. That wasn’t the day we had my first kiss (it had already happened), nor the day I had my first oral (same girl, but later), nor the first time I got laid (a month or two later with a different girl), but it was a really magical day for us and hearing a song we listened to on that day almost brings me to tears.

The smell of mothballs–OK, that’s odd, and I can’t empathize with it since I reached puberty in the free-Internet-porn generation. But something sort of similar: the smell of stale tobacco smoke on a woman’s body/clothes/hair always brings me back to a happier place. I don’t even notice it on a guy, since my dad is a massively habitual smoker and stale smoke was his “baseline” smell all through my childhood; but with my last GF, who was also the first GF to ever live with me and sleep in my bed regularly, our first “magic day” was when we cuddled in my bed all day long after she smoked a cigarette. Ever since, smelling smoke on a woman brings back that sense of excitement and anticipation from a new romance. For this reason, women who smoke have a leg up on the competition with me now, even though I was a non-smoker at the time and I’ve started and stopped smoking since.

And that first-kiss girl I mentioned earlier? She wore this one particular perfume when she had dirty thoughts in mind for the night, and for about two years I actually thought that was the smell of a woman getting aroused, despite knowing from first hand experience that it wasn’t what girly bits smelled/tasted like. That led to a number of very unfortunate misunderstandings, but even now smelling that perfume makes me randy.

I just rediscovered the emotion that Bitter Sweet Symphony (by the Verve) brings out in me today. Back in my second (third?) semester of college, I had an 8:00 AM physics class; I would always show up half an hour early, park my car, recline the seat as far as it would go and relax to whatever music was playing. It was a great way to clear my head and get myself centered and ready to take on the day. Bitter Sweet Symphony must’ve come on a couple of times during those occasions and just been the perfect song for the moment.

The smell of espresso while I’m pulling it into a cup for a customer’s drink always instills a sense of longing for me. I had to give up espresso a couple of weeks ago after a medical scare, and I really miss it when I’m making drinks for someone else with it.