Do Not Read This at Lunch

I’ve spent the past few days feeling unusually itchy, mostly thanks to the mosquitoes thriving here on the humid East Coast. A bit of my niggling urge to scratch, though, can be attributed to videos of mosquitoes, including one uploaded to YouTube by someone who thought it would “look cool to record” the insects guzzling his blood. No bugs touched my body as I watched the mosquitoes’ spindly legs tap-dance over his skin, their needle-like mouthparts piercing his flesh. But my fingernails still flew to my arm, as if I had no choice but to drive the invisible pests away.

Are mosquitoes disgusting? Itchy-scritchy ordeals like mine would argue , totally, a million times over. Mosquitoes are grody-looking creatures that invade our personal space and make us go at our own flesh and bleed; they can , sometimes alike.