Yifeng Shi

Why Mosquitos Like Me?  

a special talent that i  never asked for

I was in Chicago  by end of August for a conference. Thatcher woods. Terribly bitten (>70) bites despite i was wearing long sleeve and long pants. (exposed vs. non-exposed skin). Suffered a lot: Besides itchiness, finger, forearm, and one of the eyelid swelling. Looked literally like i just came out of a fight.  If i didn't get the green heron, i would feel absolutely miserable.

As  i crossed the woods,  i felt i was like a mosquito magnet. Always a cloud of them  near me. But other bikers or hikers were shorts and T shirts, but seem to survive pretty well. Walking in the clouds of mosquitos i miserably regretted not bringing spray with me.  This is not the first time: as i hike in bay area (especially coyote hills the grass area), i found myself attracts mosquitos more than others, at the same time, my body reacts stronger towards their bite.

Common assumptions: blood type, sweat, body smelt, carbon dioxide, body heat, pregnancy or food eaten. I do not see anything special about me that makes me stand out among all. So i started to figure out some other trivial things that i did not pay much attention to but now very curious. 

  1. fabrics, holes, and the thickness of mosquito mouthpart (microscope photos of them) 

  1. skin thickness of body -- does that affect the biting preference? 

  2. swelling-- what is actually happening? 

  3. what makes mosquito repellent work? 

 According to Eckhart Tolle, what the brotherhood did might just be useless attempt that focused on “memory”, “past”, and “external world”. If they can focus on the present moment, they will be able to move on and compromise with themselves of the fact that their mother was dead and could never come back. However, to most people, it does not require one to know what alchemist is to understand the feeling of the brotherhood: they are trying to get back something  that’s forever lost, something they knew they should have let it gone. Many, many other people understand. At some point of our lives, we all waited for people that would never come back, tried to recover things and relationships that were permanently destroyed. We knew well the best option is to loose our arms and let it go. Nevertheless we held it tighter in vain.  This ability to "resonate" with others, even with fake characters and with painful emotions, still considered by me something particularly precious and I don't really want to lose.  It’s not the feeling that I saw someone fell on the ground and say “I’m sorry it must hurt”, it’s the feeling I once fell on the ground too and remember clearly how it hurt, and now my heart trembles with the scene of the person suffering. Imagining a world where people are all enlightened, walking pass the brothers and say “they are suffering because they didn’t accept the present moment, they didn’t know the power of now. Past and future are merely illusion, and memory is not necessary unless you need it. It shouldn’t be the source of your pain”, I do not feel particularly good. Not saying people enlightened are all emotionless and cannot understand other’s feeling, but I think they lost the ability to resonate. They have their enlightened joy that’s not related to any external factors, they look at this brotherhood like a math teacher looking at a kid insisting that 1+1=3. They know it’s wrong, but they don’t feel the way the kid feels, maybe there is pity or compassion, but that's not what I am talking about. 

It's fortunate yet unfortunate that the boundary between “things can be achieved with effort” and “things that can never recover” is so blur that we struggle to cross the line to the other side. Flying in the sky was considered impossible, but some people made it, and the story was used to encourage the following generation to “never give up your dream”. Then why, trying to take a person already passed away back is something “we should not struggle with because there’s nothing we can do with it”? Why we were told things happened in the past are like plates shattered into pieces, and you can never recover them back to what they originally were.  If Robert the Bruce failed the seventh battle with England even with the inspiration from the spider web, should he say, “I’m not giving up and am going to try the eighth time!” or “This is it, I cannot win with my current ability”? About the future the only thing I could only say “you never know”. The uncertainty for sure becomes the source of anxiety, and I still don't know how Eckhart Tolle accepts every uncertainty and move on without confusion at the same time. 

I always have a lot of things to learn, as many as my endless problems pointed out by Eckhart Tolle in the book. I cannot fully convinced by the solutions he proposed at this moment, but it doesn’t hurt to get an idea of what other people are thinking. (Well, according to the author himself, "thinking" might not be the best way to describe what he tried to express, but I think you get me).  If you think you’re enlightened, will you let me know? It would be good to have a conversation with you : )

Last updated : Jan 2025