Showing posts with label karma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label karma. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

God's Punishment and the Mossie Men

The Buddhists believe in Karma – that your actions will bring about inevitable results, good or bad - and the Greek Gods punished manifestation of hubris - overweening pride - so really it was only a matter of time before my smug holiday blogging caused me to be castigated: bitten on the backside by some higher power.

In my case, retribution wasn’t a single mandible to the rear end by any higher power, but about fifty thousand mosquitoes feasting on just about every part of my sweet flesh.

I am alive with tingling, prickling and plain old hurting skin. I have so many bites that I can no longer be serene about it. As I type my lower legs are humming; radiating energy of their own existence. The bites, though certainly deployed by a number of individual mossies, are somehow linked to each other. When one on my leg itches, and I scratch, it alerts the forty eight on my left arm to the existence of my nails, and they in turn begin to hum, tingle and sing for attention of my fingernails – which, since I am on holiday, are rather nice and long. They are doing significant damage to my skin.

I think they bit me in the first resort – our room was zinging with the little buggers, no matter what extermination programme we undertook.

At this second resort, at about 6pm on the first day we received a telephone call in our room saying ‘We spray Mosquito. Don’t leave your room.’ I didn’t like to ask if there was only one mosquito was it really necessary to spray the whole resort? Instead I asked ‘how long do we stay inside?’ ‘15 minutes’ is the answer, but we really had a ringside seat.