I like to think of myself as a daisy. Daises don’t smell and neither do I. When people look at me, they’d never suspect rancid odors would emit from my flouncy feminine shell. Fresh and dainty, I am. Inconspicuous and unthreatening among an arrangement of more obtrusive flowers and unruly weeds. 

Even wilted and soggy in the depths of New York City’s subway system, I think no one will out me as a nasty mess, the rotting stem in the bundle that’s adding to the musky stench of humidity, raised arm pits and tight underground spaces. No, despite having just spent an hour at the gym, redressing in previously sweaty clothes that cling to my now dripping, sticky body, then sitting in the sun for two hours and trekking to the train with three bags strapped against my chest, I find it impossible that I could be the smelly offender in our little subway car. And more importantly, that anyone would think to suspect me.

What I hold true is the cliched affirmation embedded in every teen magazine in the Western World: How you see yourself is how others will see you too. 

So if I think I look pristine and put together, then the other people in the elevator will also believe I wasn’t the girl who just farted beneath her pencil skirt. Nor am I the person in the bagel shop who reeks of last night’s booze. Nope, no one would mistake me for such a vile being even though I’m wearing a party dress, a haphazard hair knot at the top of my head and the face of Ernest Borgnine at 10 a.m. 

In other words, I’ll just keep thinking daisy, daisy, daisy, as the summer progresses into a sweltering, suffocating vortex of oppressive, radiating density. I will not surrender my mantra or my imagined ideals of self. At least not until a breeze sweeps under my arms and smacks me in the face. 

(Above: In case you wanna smell like Carlos Santana.)