Slightly awkward friends and how to cope

I've taken a quick break from mocking the NRA to share some advice and ask for some back. Please help!  I have had my share of weird friends whom I am very fond of but who require special social adaptations.  I’m still not sure whether this is a universal thing, or whether I’m just enough of a weirdo myself to attract even weirder weirdos.  But I need help.  This is a want-ad for your input.  I will even give you up-front payment your advice in the form of some advice of my own to start.

First, the friends I know what to do with:

 The Space Invader Friend

Your personal space is no longer your own.  Your once-amusing friend has become like a badly-shot HDTV program—so close you can see their pores and hear their nose-hairs whistling.  But you’ve had some good times together and you don’t wish to end the friendship.

Solution: find an inanimate piece of furniture and back up around it as they talk to you, ever maintaining Face Space as they try to get closer.  Choose the furniture wisely—you must be able to back around it indefinitely, or you will be cornered!

 

On the plus side, these table-laps do count as your cardio workout for the day.

  

The Friend With Bad Breath

You genuinely like this person, but anytime they open their mouth to speak, dinosaur tear gas comes out.  Conversation, once your basis for tear-streaming laughter, has become a form of torture appropriate for Abu Ghraib.  Solution: find a head angle that is out of the blast.  Do your best to shield your nose and mouth while maintaining an expression of extreme interest .

The Friend Who Talks To Your Chest

This is the friend, or maybe the friend of a friend, who is irresistibly distracted when speaking to a woman.  You spend the evening getting increasingly irritated, but you know won't be able to avoid them.  Solution: wear helpful clothing.

And now, the most awkward friend for whom I beg, beseech, scream, for help in coping with.

 The Stinky Friend

How do you break it to someone that they are smelly?  I have no idea.  I’m soliciting advice here.  How many of us have been in the situation where your close friend/coworker/housemate /other person you must frequently interact with is extremely stinky and does not know it?  Worse, people who stink but are absolutely confident that they don’t stink yet can offend the hell out of even anti-deodorant hippies?  Or worst of all, those who have made a conscious decision that their hygiene is perfectly adequate and anyone who says otherwise is a snobby anti-environmentalist with ideas above their station?  What do you even say to them?

When I lived in Massachusetts, I had a housemate who qualified.  I should have paid attention to the alarm bells when I first met her--she was vaguely disheveled, but I thought, don’t be demanding, I can deal with disheveled.  I could qualify as disheveled 65% of the time.  Usually it indicates a person who is so BUSY! and ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT LIFE! that they don’t always take the time to put on runway model clothing before going to the bar.  And that’s cool, and it often means we'll get along.  In this case, however, being disheveled was an indicator of zero personal hygiene whatsoever.  It quickly became clear after this girl moved in that her concept of sanitation was to glance in the mirror once a week to make sure she didn’t have peanut butter stuck to her face.  This was an actual risk, as she could not shut her mouth to chew.  Breakfast was always oatmeal, and was always carefully rearranged inside her mouth using her tongue before swallowing—at which point she would finally close her mouth.  I don't eat oatmeal anymore. 

Now again, laziness about appearance I can deal with.  I’ve explained why my hair doesn’t always look as presentable as it might.  It’s a rare occasion that I get out the mascara, let alone all the “foundation” and “toner” crap that magazines pretend I need.  (If I did use it, I'd probably look like the cast of Jersey Shore, only not as photogenic.) But this girl—let’s call her Smellody—didn’t differentiate between personal grooming and vanity.  To her, all self-care fell under the heading of egocentric narcissism, which meant that not only did she not usually bother to shower, she would look down her nose on anybody who did.  She was convinced that as long as she didn’t have visible parasites, she was doing just fine.

She knew she was way too busy to spend time on stuff like soap.

But she wasn’t doing fine.  Her odor was pervasive, sharp, and animal.  She smelled like a combination of armpit pheromones, mold, and crotch rot.  She could clear a room just by removing a jacket, and frequently did.   Her potentially lovely hair would go unbrushed for days at a time, which meant it turned into a frizzly nesting ground for nastiness and random animal parts.  Leaving aside incontinent old people (who make me feel sympathy rather than disgust anyway), she was the foulest-smelling person I’d ever met.  Worse, when she moved in, I realized it wasn’t just her body that smelled—it was her car, jackets, and entire bedroom as well.  This meant that she didn’t even have to be physically present for you to be olfactorily assaulted.  Leaving her door open would lead to a meaty, rotten aroma of dead skin cells and secretions wafting through our entire apartment, which could only be dispersed by leaving all the windows open for an hour.  It became a choice between Smellody’s body odor and being frozen to death in winter.  I tried to simply shut her door whenever I walked past, but she would obstinately leave it open and the one time I asked her to shut it, she challengingly asked, “Why?” and I didn’t have the heart to explain.

Our friends started to avoid visiting my apartment.  When she would turn up at social events (which happened whenever she heard about them, invited or not), people would find excuses to leave, making our parties very short-lived—especially since she was always the last to leave.  (She did like a party, she had that going for her.) Whispered discussions were held as to how on earth we should address this nose-assaulting problem.  Should we keep our social affairs a secret?  That would prevent new friends from joining us, and we were a welcoming bunch.  Plus we would have to have everyone on board in a mutual pact not to say a word.  Should we ask her not to come along?  Given that she'd cried in the corner of the bar for weeks the last time she'd broken up with a guy, this did not seem like a good option either.  Should we actually explain to her that she stank?  This was the mutually approved approach—but who would do it?

Naturally, eyes turned toward me as her housemate.  I shouldered the burden with an Atlas-like shrug.  After all, we were friends; how difficult could it be to subtly drop the hint if I lived with her?

Unfortunately, these efforts often ended with me thrown by her inability to pay attention to subtext.

“Smellody, I’m washing a bunch of jackets, can I throw yours in?” I would say.

“Sure, go ahead,” she would reply, continuing to stink obliviously.

Clearly I needed to be blunter.  So I upped the hint.

One day, with a big smile, I said, “Ha ha, what is that smell… oh no, Smellody, I think your shirt might have gotten into the wrong laundry pile!”

“Huh?” she replied.

Me: “You can’t smell that?  I think your shirt might be… dirty…”

Smellody: “Smell what?  It’s fine.”

And I had to slink off with my tail between my legs.

I steeled myself to try again.  Should I give her a gift basket from Body Shop?  No; she would see the use of such products as unnecessary vanity that she was far too busy to bother with.  Could I stage a “makeover night” with someone else?  Sure, but most likely Smellody would just say how all this was so hilariously beneath her and leave, or make a melodramatic fuss about how annoying it all was.  I couldn’t imagine that the lesson would stick.  So I kept on thinking, and putting off saying anything.

Then one day I realized that the armpit/crotch/meat smell had spread—it was now coming out of the bathroom as well.  I had to ask.

Me: “Smellody, can I ask you a personal question?”

Smellody: “Sure.”

Me: “When was the last time you washed your towel?”

Smellody: “I dunno, a couple of weeks ago?”

Me: speechless silence

This made me realize I was up against more than a poor shower regime.  As I understand it, body odor is produced by two factors in concert:  sweat glands in the armpits and groin producing mostly odorless but thick, nutritive gunk, and the bacteria that live on skin which enthusiastically consume said nutritive gunk. 

Yummm!  GUNK!

The resulting excreta produced by the bacteria are the source of the stink.  For most people, showering removes both gunk and bacteria.  But with Smellody, not only did she shower infrequently enough to ensure a good buildup of gunk, she was constantly re-inoculating herself with stink-bacteria every time she did shower, by drying off with a towel that might as well have been a petri dish.  Around the same time, it dawned on me that she’d lived with me for about five months and I had never once seen her wash her sheets.  So she was getting her bacterial starter culture from all over the place!

This was a major setback.  It meant that addressing her stinkiness would take way more than a simple gift of a deodorant can.  If I was going to unstinkify Smellody, I would have to convince her to change her entire hygiene regime, including teaching her about regular sheet and towel washing, explaining to her that she must shower every day, and that no, a quick application of cheap deodorant was not a sufficient substitute.  In short, I would need to be her mother.

So what did I do?  I despaired and moved out.

Suggestions welcome.