An American Lion

Stress has never been a problem for me--I thrive on stress. I thrive on tension, anger, resentment, fear and visceral hate. The more enraged I am, the more I get done. The eternal image I have of myself is of a badass in a boonie hat, kicking a can up the road, and getting things done.

Fortunately, I have around me a group of people who also thrive on my moods and my anger. Mr. Peej always says the right thing to calm me down, as in, "that's a $3,000 laptop you're about to throw" and "that crystal decanter is worth $21,000 at auction." He has been invaluable in keeping me out of legal troubles. Sometimes, I think Peej was put here to be my keeper.

Miranda reacts to me like a magnet reacts to another magnet. She cannot understand me, but she does know how to emulate me. She gets into her little moods, such as when she cannot find the right combination of goth gear to wear to the wrong prom or when she cannot locate a parking spot at the Columbia Mall. Yes, ladies, that's my daughter calling you a fat ass.

Father is the source of my "walking road rage" I would imagine. He is always in a state of agitation and consternation. He is always shaking his fists at things or jumping into chairs just to see if he can make coins fly out of the cushions. Usually, when he finds a coin or a potato that he didn't know about, it calms him down and we can go back to eating dinner or having a conversation with him.

Byron is the easy-going member of the family. He just smiles and waves from the miniature mink compound out back when things in the house go south. He cheers me up with his stories. I had no idea there were so many subplots in World of Warcraft.

That being said, it should be a given that my continuing state of rage puts me into a kind of lather; a foaming, sweaty lather that no reasonable amount of deodorant or anti-perspirant can check. I start to sweat at the hair line just behind my ears, and then I sweat down my back. I can feel rivulets running down my back when I have a good sweat going--my back muscles are that toned from the Pilates ball. I don't pit out right away, but I have ruined many a good dress shirt. The tell-tale "ring around the collar" shows up on a blue dress shirt once I've had it for a while. And why don't we hear anything about "ring around the collar" anymore? Well, that's because American males don't work in offices that much anymore, dress codes are almost non-existent, and air conditioning is ubiquitous.

This sort of thing doesn't surprise me:

new study published in the online journal PLoS One reveals changes in brain activity when people are exposed to sweat from others who have been in a stressful situation. Researchers found that people may become more alert to potential threats when inhaling this "stress" sweat.

"The results suggest that we can detect others' stress just by breathing in their sweat," said Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Stony Brook University in New York and lead author of the study, in an e-mail.

Researchers took sweat samples from 144 people who had put themselves in the somewhat stressful situation of tandem skydiving for the first time. Each participant was strapped to an expert skydiver, and each pair jumped from 13,000 feet. Control samples were taken from people who had run on a treadmill.

In the first trial, sweat samples from the experimental and control conditions from 40 donors were given to eight males and eight females while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This procedure was repeated with 40 more donors and a group of 16 different participants with the same gender ratio.

Imaging results indicated that the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with emotion, was more active when exposed to the skydivers' sweat than to the runners' sweat. An additional experiment showed that participants could not discriminate between the sweat samples based on smell alone.

Since when is "tandem skydiving" stressful? And who is capable of smelling the "difference" between different kinds of sweat in the first place? Which Poindexter put this study together?

There's more:

In humans, no one has identified analogous chemical compounds that serve as signals or prompt behavior in these ways, Wysocki said. However, humans may have their own kinds of pheromones.

One of Wysocki's studies showed that when women were exposed to male underarm sweat, they became more relaxed and less tense. That paper also found that male sweat may affect the length and timing of a woman's menstrual cycle.

Other studies have concluded that people give off different body odors that correspond to certain emotional situations, but what hasn't been shown is whether other people become a little stressed after smelling the body odor from stressed people, Wysocki said. The Stony Brook study goes in that direction, looking at the brain region that modulates emotion and finding that people responded differently to behavioral tests.

Having been married four times, and having a daughter live with me her entire life, I can assure you--women are not comforted by my sweat. Being sweaty actually tamps down my natural inclination to be frisky, to be completely candid with you. However, It excited three of my wives whenever I got sweaty, and there's nothing comforting or reassuring about being climbed by a woman with needs. The inherent dominance of my overall frisky gland would supercede my enraged and sweaty gland, in other words. My second wife was a prude--she didn't like sweaty love. She would order me to shower, and then she would use baby powder on me. Miranda just sprays me with Febreeze and tells me to go away.

There is probably an evolutionary reason why our sweat smells and does things the way that it does--you stink because of bacteria, by the way. The alpha male in every pack, whether we're talking wolves or humans, has to have a way to communicate with others who are lesser in status, and maybe there is something to the idea that sweat would carry signals to the others.  Typically, though, when I'm sweating and worked up into a lather, Mr. Peej just brings me Gatorade and some potato chips, and that's really all I'm looking for at that point.