AUDREY REED
News Editor
According to a deodorant commercial, “Scent is the strongest sense tied to memory.” If the slogan is true, when I leave Malibu in less than a year, I’ll have a potpourri of memories to look back upon.
Malibu and Pepperdine can be smelly. In labs, when you have to identify what a chemical smells like, you waft, or wave the air directly over the chemical, to get a whiff of it.
But in Malibu, we have no such luxury. The scents of the city cannot be gently wafted. People must either hold their breath or inhale.
Not all smells have to be bad though. Who doesn’t like smelling fresh paper in the copy room? Even though the Caf food isn’t gourmet, I’ve been enticed many times by emitted aromas.
Somewhere between the good and bad smells are the beach smells. Sometimes it’s literally a gust of fresh air and other times it’s disgusting.
Also in the in-between category is the Dume Room. Well, it’s more the way someone smells once he or she has left the Dume Room. Any clothes worn to the hangout should be cleaned on the super wash setting twice or burned.
Malibu is indeed photogenic, but the standing downwind in the city will change a few people’s definition of beauty. The water may be blue and the hills maybe be rolling, but the picturesque scenery can easily be destroyed by a sewage leak from the Malibu Lagoon.
I don’t think that the Admission Office will be releasing a scratch-and-sniff guide to Pepperdine and the surrounding areas anytime soon. Let’s stick to the traditional, panoramic shots.
Take the apartment complex known as the “Stinkies.’ Who really even knows the real name of the building that so many Pepperdine student reside in? (For the record, it’s called the Malibu Canyon Village Apartments.) The culprits of the stench are the septic tanks below the apartments that are used by the Malibu Colony and the shopping center across Pacific Coast Highway.
But no place can rival the Upsilon parking lot. Amid the student cars, a few Dumpsters are also housed there. By nature, Dumpsters are smelly. However, the Upsilon lot Dumpsters are just plain foul. The only living beings that don’t seem to mind the smell are the raccoons.
Even when the Dumpsters are empty, a smell lingers. I was going to see if something was rotting under them, but I couldn’t hold my breath long enough to check.
But why is the smell situation like this? It reminds me of fifth-grade, when the boys, who hadn’t yet discovered deodorant, came back from recess and no one wanted to sit next to them.
Malibu is trying to build a new water treatment facility that would make the Stinkies nickname a misnomer. However, that only takes care of part of the problem.
In the case of Pepperdine’s smelly situation, as well as with the fifth grade boys, deodorant can only cover up a problem. What our community, or at least our dumpsters need, is a bath.
09-29-2005
