One very odd and disturbing thing I noticed while living in Taiwan as an overseas teacher is that all the mosquitos there were extremely intelligent. They would carefully strategize how and when they were going to sting you.
I had worked at a summer camp in the United States before, so I knew the absolute hell they could wreak on a person's nerves. All of the American mosquitos at summer camp, however, were dumb. They would sting the hell out of you in hordes, you would kill them, and that was it.
Mosquitos in Taiwan were actually manipulative, evasive, and well prepared to fuck you up. It could drive you insane if you weren't prepared. They would wait until you were almost asleep…(and I don't just mean lying in bed trying to sleep. I mean right at the god-damn moment when you were in the final stages of the phase between consciousness and dreaming)…and then they would appear out of thin air and sting you repeatedly before you even knew what was going on.
The blood-sucking little bastards actually watched you sleep, coldly calculating the precise moment at which you began to enter the dream stage, and then they would call their friends to come out. They would enter through a small gap in your mosquito net (one that they had found on one of their recon missions during the daylight hours) and then the attacks would occur in short, unexpected bursts often leaving you dazed, itchy, confused, and really pissed off. By the time you turned on the lights, they had already vanished. (In other words, they didn't use conventional means of warfare. They used guerrilla tactics.)
I figured that if the Taiwanese mosquitos were smart enough to elaborately plan such tactics, they were probably also smart enough to realize that I was from Wisconsin and that I was teaching overseas because I couldn't find a job back home. Any reasonable person would come to that conclusion, and I am definitely a reasonable person.
So quite logically, I figured that their main priority was to sting me in precisely-timed waves of attack so that my sleep hours were minimized to the point where I would actually go insane, lose my ability to function properly during the day, and get fired from my job.
They knew that if that happened, I would end up back in Wisconsin unemployed. I didn't know why they were trying to do that to me. I had never done anything to them. But either way, that was their objective. To make me move back to Wisconsin, have no job, and become broke.
After 4 weeks of this shit, I drew the line. Instead of going out on weekends, doing anything social, or even asking out the really cute girl who worked in the bakery shop down the street, I stayed in my room and spent all my time planning elaborate defense strategies against their attacks.
One method that worked was to drink so much beer that they would die from alcohol poisoning when they stung me. I killed 8 or 9 of them with that method. Another method was to eat so much sugar that any mosquito that stung me would develop type 2 diabetes. I actually gave 3 mosquitos type 2 diabetes. They just flew around dizzy and forgot to attack me.
Warfare is a funny thing, and sometimes part of a good offense involves sending a clear message to the enemy. The message I sent to those blood-thirsty, little bastards was that I was not going back to Wisconsin (unless, of course, I was simply fired for smelling like alcohol all the time and for having poor and ineffective teaching strategies that involved giving boring, tedious, and extremely uninspiring lectures from HOLT, RINEHARD & WINSTON published social studies textbooks.)
In order to send that message, I caught one of their friends (one of the slow ones that had grown fat off of my blood) and I smashed his disgusting little body against my wall. He basically exploded all over the place like a balloon. I left his dead body on my wall to send a clear message to his friends. A message that said, “Hey Bitches! I'm not leaving, and if you keep fucking with me, this will happen to you!”
The dead mosquito stayed on my wall for 3 days. He eventually dried out to the point where he looked like a dried-out, purple booger. At that point, I knew there was no going back. The message had been sent, and there were no holds barred.
Immediately after I did that, another mosquito bit me in the face, so I grabbed him, flung him in the toilet, and peed on him. And sure enough, another one flew by and bit me in the penis as I was doing that. So, I grabbed him and threw him in the toilet so that he could be with his friend. Because I was really drunk (and sick) off of cheap Taiwan beer at that particular moment, I also threw up on both of them.
A third mosquito came along, saw what I had just done to his companions, and decided sting my roommate instead.
It was total war, and I couldn't back down. I realized that I had to stay single while I was in that country because if I had a girlfriend, the mosquitos would attack her just to get to me. (Also, I had killed several other mosquitos on my wall…which meant that my walls were covered with dead, bloody mosquitos that look like dried-out, purple boogers.) After years of living and making mistakes, I already knew one very hard lesson…females are not impressed with guys who have walls covered with dead things that look like dried-out, purple boogers. It's just a fact of life. There is nothing worse than taking a woman out to dinner, showing her a good time, and then bringing her back to a room with walls that are plastered with mosquito blood and crusty mosquito bodies that look like dried-out, purple boogers. Sometimes they verbally express their disapproval, but most of the time they just cheat on you.
Also, the emotional and psychological scars of engaging in mosquito warfare were enough to deal with without the added pain of being in a relationship that probably wasn't going to work. It would have been too hard to explain to them that my walls were covered with things that look like bloody boogers and that I couldn't clean them off my wall for the simple reason that I didn't want to go back to Wisconsin with no job. They would not have understood. (I eventually came back to Wisconsin with no job anyway, but that's not the point.)
So the war was on. And as I was sitting at my desk reading a very exciting book about the repercussions of sexual dysfunction in the United States between the period of 1923-1952, there was a mosquito sitting up in the corner of my wall watching me and calculating my every move.
I pretended that I didn't see him, but I knew exactly what he was thinking. What he didn't realize is that he was about to become the next piece of decoration on my Wall of Death.
