Because I now take public transportation regularly, I expose my poor self to the elements. The other day when my wife picked me up from the BART station, she said, “Amoy araw ka (you smell like the sun).” Now this doesn’t mean I smelled Tide-fresh. Rather it means I smelled like the outdoors. You know, that smell. In the Filipino vernacular, “smelling like the sun” means someone has been walking under the hot sun and smells like it. Well, on that particular day O picked me up, the sun wasn’t out and I hardly sweated. I simply spent some time outdoors. I attribute this smell to pollutants, particularly automobile emissions, that cling to clothes and give you that outdoorsy scent that gets mistaken for body odor (ha, how’s that for explaining that away?). Besides, has anybody taken a whiff of the sun before?