5. The smell of my girlfriend's arm. Or hair. Or her Dr. Pepper lip gloss.

6. Summer before senior year, I worked at USC School of Pharmacology as a dog-walker/rabbit-phlebotomist. Those dogs walked me. The USC vivarium smelled of dog shit and antiseptic, but mostly of dog shit. Nothing smells quite like a vivarium.


7. College chemistry brought me the smell of baths of MEK (methyl ethyl ketone, which we used to clean glassware). Lift the lid and it hit you, two fat gassy fingers shoved up your nostrils into your brain. Glacial acetic acid, nitric acid, and hydrochloric acid each have their characteristic smell-memories. Runner-up: marijuana smoke at my friend Sam's co-op.

8. Graduate school: My Life as a Scientist. Molecular biologist, to be exact. And what do I remember, more than any other smell? TEMED, a catalyst which makes acrylamide polymerize. TEMED gives acrid new meaning. (We also used beta mercapto-ethanol, but rotten eggs? Boring. Get over it.) Runner up: phenol, which we used to extract protein during the purification of DNA.


9. Med school: where to begin? Perhaps with decubitus ulcers, like a wet dog gone horribly wrong. But my pick would have be the fecal smell of any medicine ward. You can always tell when you're on a medical, rather than a surgical ward, by the penetrating aroma of the bed pans.


10. Internship and first year of residency: alcohol-and-blood breath. As low man on the totem pole, when I was on call, I would suture the torn lips, mouths, and tongues of every drunk sonofabitch who got belted, fell on his face, crashed his car, you name it. We had a secret weapon against alcohol-and-blood breath (which, trust me, is far worse than dog breath): cepacol and hydrogen peroxide. Gargle, spit, repeat.

11. Jacob was born during my year as faculty at USC -- forever after known as the Douglas Hoffman Remedial Year. I wish I was kidding. I'm thinking about Jake's first week at home, and how Karen and I fought (jokingly, of course) over the right to change his diapers. Parental love hit us like a policeman's sap. Neither one of us expected it. Jake's diapers -- well, maybe you parents will understand. We were in heaven.


12. I'm asking myself, "What did Texas smell like?" and all I can remember is our last summer, when fires raged across the Rio Grande, and for weeks the sky remained a sickly umber.

13. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we're never more than ten minutes away from the redwoods. After growing up in smoggy Los Angeles, you can't imagine how sweet that is.