Looking back, I know for a fact that there was good reason for my younger self to have had insomnia. As a kid, I attracted mosquitoes like a magnet attracts iron shavings. Mom always told me that I have sweet blood.
I was the kind of kid who couldn’t stop itching a mosquito bite once I started, so I often had inflamed, infected bites on my legs. It was gross.
Well, when we moved back to Germany for my dad’s second tour there, we stayed in a temporary house for about half a year (I can’t remember exactly when we moved from Kalkar to Goch because I didn’t change schools or anything). It was there that I discovered exactly how much sleep I would get on average for the next three years.
I would go to bed. I would close my eyes. I would try to fall asleep.
Then I would hear it. It didn’t matter if I was dozing or in full dream, I would hear that zzzzzzeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee of mosquito. I would snap awake. For the first few weeks, I would snap awake and find them on my walls. I’d kill them right then and there, leaving gruesome splotches of grey and red on the paint. I never cleaned those up- they were symbols of my victories over the bloodsuckers. I could go to bed afterwards and sleep relatively soundly.
It steadily got more difficult. They started resting farther up on the ceilings, or they just disappeared.
One night, I woke up to the sound and got out of bed. I turned on the light and saw… nothing. The only mosquitoes visible were the ones I had already smashed on the walls. I went back to sleep.
The noise occurred again. I got out of bed and turned on the light again. Still… nothing. Weird. I thought at first that I might be hearing them out of anticipation of hearing them.
It happened like this a couple more times before I finally thought to check the curtains.
Now, these curtains were greyish-brown. Drab, like the room. I cautiously approached them, and, taking a great fistful of the coarse material in each hand, SHOOK them.
With a ZZZZEEEEEEEEEEEEE magnified by the vibration of hundreds of wings, a swarm of them emerged en masse from my curtains.
Needless to say, I was traumatized by the incident. Later that night, I worked up the courage to go into my room and kill all of the mosquitoes, but I was forever paranoid of those curtains and of sleep.
When we moved to Goch later that year, I slept on a mattress on the floor of my room until my parents got me a loft. With the loft, they got me a mosquito net (something neither of my siblings required).
Lofts are not made for mosquito nets. Or, rather, vice-versa. We rigged that thing with duct tape and clothespins. It worked pretty well, but mosquitoes could still get in when I climbed into bed, or through holes that I had not seen.
Some of the worst nights of my life have been spent after hearing that zzzzzzeeeeeeeee of mosquito and trying to find the damned insect. I patched holes, I flicked the light on and off (the mosquitoes eventually started hiding when the light was turned on, so the best way to find them was to catch them as they flew around), I would read until I felt calm enough to sleep again.
I’m not a night person, but I developed extreme insomnia while we were overseas due to this tiny pest.
This reminds me of what I went through in High School in Ghana, I was in a boarding house and there, about 22 people sleep in the same room,all freshmen students are required to bring their own mosquito net but sleeping in it is not that much fun so I took mine of sometime getting close to sophomore year and it all started, I got sick with malaria and I lost some blood….from then I always slept in a mosquito net but even with that I got sick again in my senior year so I asked myself….does it even matter whether you sleep in a net or not? because apparently I was sleeping in one but I still got sick.
great post, but so traumatizing!
Oh my gosh! That’s horrible!! D: I can’t believe they were hiding in your curtains!!
@Osheen: Mosquito nets can reduce the occurrence of bites, but not take it away completely, especially if you spend time walking outside during the day. I’m glad none of the mosquitoes that have bitten me have ever carried anything dangerous. I took parasitology a couple semesters ago- lemme just say that malaria sounds awful.
@Cali4beach: Yeah. This was going to be the “bug” post, but I thought that adding spider encounters might take things too far.
@Media Tourist: I couldn’t either. As long as we remained in that house after the incident, I shook the curtains before bed. They got smarter, though, and stopped flying out with a light shake. As time went by, I had to really move the fabric to scare them into the open.
Traumatizing indeed – it reminds me of those awful b&w movies with giant carnivorous rabid rabbits and the like. I really enjoyed the “great swarm” drawing, it captured the moment.
Thanks! I can illustrate in more detail/ less stick-figurey, but I felt that it wouldn’t add that much to this post. It’s the mosquitoes that I wanted to focus on.
Is there a place I can watch these b&w movies? It might be a good place to start for an idea my apartment-mate and I want to do.
This is a good place to start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIsI7CwjH3M
Here is another goodie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them!
They are known as Creature Features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_Features
Also, don’t forget about The Birds, by Hitchcock, which is actually good.
Ehhh… As far as Hitchcock goes, I like his others a bit more. Rear Window is pretty high up on my list. I find the characters slightly more compelling in that one.
I wasn’t afraid of The Birds, I thought it was kinda dumb. But I had this parakeet that lived in my room at the time, and sometimes in the middle of the night that bird would start squawking blue bloody murder, frantically flapping around his cage as if he were possessed. I will admit that the first few times that happened after watching The Birds, I may have lay in bed contemplating that bird’s doom…
Haha. Wow. Our Cockatiels would do that sometimes. But they were spastic and challenged- one would regularly fly into windows when we got her out of the cage.
Yeah. The parakeet flew into a lot of walls. I don’t know why, I didn’t clip his wings because he’d sit there and gnaw on my hand the whole time, but he still couldn’t avoid big, solid walls….
Yikes. Walls? Maneena could avoid walls, but she flew into everything else.
Haha, we always used a brown towel to hold them. Gabby didn’t do much more than nip, but the female could pinch really hard. And Birby… well, I posted about Birby’s tendency to bite. With Birby, it doesn’t make much of a difference. He can’t fly more than a couple of feet even with his flight feathers.
With our Cockatiels… well, since they rarely came out of the cage (they didn’t like it and we were not going to be bothered to chase them around the cage until we caught them) it was hardly worth it. We still did it, though. Gabby always made himself look as skinny as possible afterwards- he was soooo traumatized.
We had a series of birds. All parakeets. It started with “Sir Falcon the Mighty, Great Winged Predator of the South, Here To Save All the People of the United States and The World from Whatever Perils Might Torture Them, And to Avenge the Great Sir Robin in Succeeding to Save the World form Nuclear Destruction – Preserving Rain Forests and Habitats Along The Way” and ended with the “Bird.” Those two were mine.
But my sister had one named Westley (that eventually escaped.) He was the smartest of the bunch….. kinda…. He loved to get out (he knew how to open his own cage if we didn’t twisty tie it together. He flew away because of that…) But once he hopped out, and tried to chirp and leap his way across the short distance to Sir Falcon The Yada-Yada’s cage… (they were separate because Westley had mites that made him need shots in his little birdy belly!) But the “smart” bird of our little train of birds hopped RIGHT ACROSS THE NOSE of our huge cat…. I mean huge. Like, 17 lb huge. The Cat was asleep, and we watched as he woke up to a bird twitter across his feet and face… and he snatched that bird right up!
Good thing the cat was so asleep he didn’t know what to do next, so we managed to rescue Westley without even a mark. Just a little annoyance on his part. He hadn’t made it to the other cage…
Haha. Wow. Now that’s something that would make a great set of illustrations. XP