So I mopped the kitchen and the bathroom in my apartment today. The entire apartment smelled like Jewel-brand Pine Cleaner for several hours after I finished.
To an alien arriving on the planet Earth, this would seem like an odd phenomenon: “So let me get this straight. You’re going to take your living space, which you created prescisely to seperate yourself from the outdoors, and try to make it smell…like the outdoors? Why?”
And when I respond that it seems cleaner when it smells like pine, he will respond, “But pine trees have all that sap, you know, the kind that makes the pine needles stick to your shoes if you’re hiking, or your pants if you’re stupid enough to sit down in a pine forest.”
Becuase this is an unusually knowledgable little alien.
Eventually I will make him understand that artificial pine scent is a much more pleasurable smell than eau de burnt hamburger, which has permeated this apartment for a couple of days after I tried to cook a mega burger (the kind of burger you get when you accidentally get too high a proportion of the ground beef you get from the store into one patty) at too high a temperature and ended up just burning the damn thing.
And the alien will smile, and dance. Because that’s what aliens do. I think.