Pilot: “Please make sure that your valuables are secured and your seat and dinner tray are in the upright, locked position as we prepare for takeoff.”
I’ve heard that smell is the sense most associated with memory.
It’s something about the way the olfactory and memory centers of the brain work together to make a strong connection between stored experience and what we smelled at the time.
I now believe that.
On Wednesday, the first day of classes, I was quite puzzled in class due to a latent smell I couldn’t quite identify.
It was strange, not only because I couldn’t place it, but also because it was somehow sublevel to the obvious array of smells.
There was something hidden under the usual smells of new notebooks, rain and soon-to-be-crushed hopes and dreams that freshmen give off.
To the possible detriment of my first psychology class, I shut my eyes and tried to identify the smell.
I finally realized with some perplexity what the odor was and murmured out loud: “Airplane?”
Thinking about it since then, it’s made more and more sense to me.
Pilot: “Please make sure that your valuables are secured and your seat and dinner tray are in the upright, locked position as we prepare for takeoff.”
Prof: “I expect all students to be in their seats when it’s time for class. I have no tolerance for tardiness.”
Pilot: “Please turn off all cell phones and other electronic devices.”
Prof: “If you bring a cell phone to an exam and it goes off, you will be ejected from the exam and given a zero.”
Pilot: “Please take note of the emergency exits, and feel free to address any of the in-flight crew with safety concerns.”
Prof: “My office hours are Monday and Thursday, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.”
So I guess that’s it.
I strongly associate the first week of classes with the mundane experiences I’ve had waiting for airplanes to take off.
Waiting for classes to get into real material; waiting for a plane to taxi down the runway.
Maybe the underlying smell of recycled air and mild disinfectant is a bad sign.
Maybe I should take the first week of classes more seriously.
After all, the first week of classes can be a strong sign of what a semester will hold.
Perhaps I can rise above my cynical, slacker nature and draw a lot of hopeful prospects about my next four months at UF.
Then again, listening to a teaching assistant read the syllabus inspires the same behavior that the flight attendants’ flight safety song and dance does: reading the paper.
Nate Rushing is a UF political science student.
