Mosquito Bites

Here's a memory:

After the first week-or-so in Brisbane and then the week in the rain forest, bush, and outback with John Hall, Diana, and Claire Baker, my group of students swapped with the other group, that had just spent a week in the Daintree (a seriously gorgeous place), learning about mangroves.

The Stanford group that had just been in the mangroves warned us that the sandflies and mosquitoes were out of control: a bunch of them showed us their arms, covered with mosquito bites and sandfly scars.

Now I am delicious. Bugs love me. Usually I am capable of acting as bug spray for other people because no one else gets bitten when there's a piece of me up for the taking. So I took one look at everyone else and began to worry. Thus, even though it was rather hot and humid, I spent my time in the Daintree wearing a raincoat (mosquitoes have a harder time biting through that than normal shirts), long pants tucked into my socks (so fashionable, I know), and smelling like OFF bug spray.

But here's the thing: it worked! Unlike most other people, I didn't get a single mosquito bite. It's hard to emphasize what a miracle this is, but yesterday, wandering around Stanford's campus, I got about a dozen really itchy ones. I was so impressed with my ability to avoid the mosquitoes that I must've gotten cocky and tragedy struck.

I needed to go pee late at night, so I oozed out of our tent cabin-thing (good enough to keep mosquitoes out, but strangely unable to keep rats or gigantic spiders out. On a side note, those tent cabin-things were opaque green tarp right up to about chest level, and then turned into impressively see-through netting. Interesting choice, there) and wandered over to the bathrooms. Unsuspectingly, I sat down. In an act of life, the sort that only happens to me, I trapped a mosquito in the toilet bowl with my behind. Needless to say, being literally presented with a delicious piece of ass, the mosquito went to town.

All of my careful mosquito-precautions were undone in one fell swoop. I spent the next week enduring the world's itchiest butt and scratching vigorously when I thought no one was looking.