Preggers Skeeter?

I realize that many of my blog entries have been about bugs. This trend will stop. However, I have one more bug tale before the moratorium commences. Also, I’d like to defend myself by saying that I think bug incidents often are kind of interesting, because it reminds us that despite all appearances in NYC, we are still living in nature. Also, even though we’re three trillion times bigger than most bugs, they still have the capacity to terrorize us. Strange.

Anyway.

I was awoken at 5 am this morning with an itchy chin and an itchy hand. I convince myself that I am being silly, that I’m just paranoid because Athena had bed bugs a while back, and that nothing is biting me. At 5:30, I awaken to myself making a noise something along the lines of, “Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” and the startled, disgruntled dislodging of the cats from where they had been adorably positioned, snuggled up next to me. My pinky finger has definitely, definitively, been bitten. I turn on the light and see that it has swollen up so much that it’s doing that gross thing where the swelling reaches a joint and then can’t go anywhere so is just sort of stopped in its tracks to balloon ugly-ly. And the bites on my chin and hand are, I find, also extant. It is then that I espy the culprit.

Egad!

It is one of two things: the largest mosquito the world has ever known, or the smallest horsefly the world has ever known. Either way, it is evil, and I attempt to slaughter it. I fail. It vanishes, and I think, OK, well, let’s not get ridiculous, I should just go back to sleep and ignore it. I won’t die. Unless it’s carrying avian bird flu or west nile virus or malaria. I decide to throw the blanket over my head so that only my face is exposed, which I hope will make me appear a less delectable treat for the beast.

Sleep comes, grudgingly. Approximately five minutes after resuming slumber, I awake when Ninja swipes at my face. While my cats often mistake my eyelashes for playthings, especially when I am asleep, I have an ominous sense of foreboding this time. I run to the bathroom, and yes, it’s true.

I have a gigantor bite on my nose, and one slightly to the left of my nose. The pinky, hand and chin bites, oddly, have all faded and ceased itching. This is a characteristic of the bites of this creature: the bites itch horribly for only a few minutes, then fade away more quickly than any bites I’ve ever had, leaving me wondering if they were ever there at all. Sly trick, bug.

It is now 6am. Sleep is clearly a lost cause. I get up and go to a café, where I proceed to read for 2 hours. Sort of pleasant, but I’m reading THE IMPRESSIONIST by Hari Kunzru. If you’ve read it, you’ll know that it’s an odd and disquieting way to start the day.

One other thing: it is mid-December. Why is there a summer bug in my room?! Maybe because it’s been 60 degrees outside. Having just watched AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH the other night, it seems particularly ominous. Though that movie was insanely boring and concluded with a loathsome song by Melissa Etheridge.

Since I refuse to end a blog post with the words “Melissa Etheridge,” I will relate another worry, which is that this was a preggers skeeter, and the pregnancy was what a) made it hugemungous and b) what changed the chemicals of the poison, rendering the bites briefer and more intense. Nooooooo . . .