ToughDiamond wrote:
My interest in them has become jaundiced since spending a lot of time in Arkansas and "enjoying" the risks of being bitten or stung by Lyme-infested Lone Star deer ticks, brown recluse spiders, mosquitos, fleas, and whatever else is lurking about waiting to mess up my life for me. I should probably study the lives of those particular species with a view to finding out how to keep them away from me without using toxic chemicals. The nearest I've got to that is to use 2% dish soap as a killing spray and as a material to use in moats round the kitchen waste bin and the cat's food bowl - quite effective against ants at least. Beyond that I do find insects quite interesting, though I've never made an extensive study of them.
When I was a young teenager I went through a phase of trying to make realistic-looking imitation insects from whatever materials were to hand. A little later on I tried to put ants into suspended animation by freezing them, and that seemed to be working for times of a few minutes, but sadly I found out that it was only immobilising them and that if they were in the freezer long enough to freeze solid, they just died. I gather insects don't have the nervous system required to experience pain or mental anguish, so I guess my tomfoolery wasn't doing any harm, though in the case of ticks etc. I sometimes wish I could hurt them.
I've always liked butterflies and ladybirds, and am quite fond of moths. I enjoyed reading about the bizarre insects in Alice Through The Looking-Glass.
Lone star ticks actually are different from deer ticks and are unlikely to carry Lyme disease (I got bitten by one at summer camp last year and looked them up, since they’re pretty easy to identify). But yeah, my mom’s parents live in Arkansas, and there are a
ton of ticks there (quite possibly literally, if they were all gathered up and weighed together). My grandma got some sort of tick-transmitted disease (I think it was ehrlichthiosis) and had to go to the hospital (she and my grandpa were visiting my uncle and his family in the Chicago area at the time symptoms started and ticks are
far less prevalent there, so it took a while for her to get a proper diagnosis). My brother also got a tick in his ear (yes,
inside his ear) once, but didn’t have any problems once it was out. If we visit them again this year and my service dog comes along (which we’ve been considering doing), I’ll have to make absolutely sure he doesn’t miss his flea and tick prevention that month (it works well enough that one time my parents and I took him along on a nature walk, and the dog was the only one who didn’t come back with any hitchhikers, the humans each had at least one tick). I can say I have no great love for the blood-suckers like ticks and fleas.
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Yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
-H. P. Lovecraft, "The Outsider"