Yes, its true. I am a highly attractive person. Ever since I was a little boy I have had this curse. I would easily be singled out from a group of others for special attention because of it. It really has been a curse to me.

I am a mosquito magnet.

WebMD recently had an article about how some people are especially attractive to mosquitoes.. and I know that is me.

“One in 10 people are highly attractive to mosquitoes,” reports Jerry Butler, PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Florida. WebMD: Are You a Mosquito Magnet?

They haven’t figured out why yet, but somewhere there are people in lab coats working on it. To them, I say: Thank you! Keep up the good work!

All my life I could be in a crowd or with just one other person and they would look quizzically at me as I do my masochistic mosquito calisthenics.. arms and legs flailing about, repeatedly hitting myself. I would dread the days dad would ask me to help him outside in the garden. He would work away peacefully while I fought the little dragons. I was never much help to dad on such days as I rarely accomplished more than spreading bug guts and my own blood all over my body. He would wonder what my problem was as he didn’t have any around him at all, but if I pointed it out to him dad would notice the swarm of mosquitoes around me, each waiting for a landing strip to clear.

Hmm.. here’s something that never occurred to me before.. maybe that is why he took me along.. as bait.

To make it worse, I am allergic to the little monsters. It was more severe when I was younger, but even now I can swell up pretty good. As a kids I would frequently go about the summer looking like a full body case of the mumps.. big welts up and down my arms and legs, on my face..

Once I took a mosquito bite above my right eye and one below my left eye at the same time. Result: blind kid. Both eyes were swollen completely shut. After a couple days mom took me to a hospital where some tricky nurse stabbed my butt with a needle. About 18 hours later I woke up, able to see but rather upset that I had slept through Saturday morning cartoons.

Me at four years old with mosquito bites around my eyes.

Thankfully the allergy has abated some in my.. ahem… adult life. But I can still receive a large welt that will slowly go down to an itchy spot that can last for weeks.

I used to think that mosquitoes were like cats.. they could come into a room of 10 people and instinctively know the one person in the room that was allergic to them, and then try to curl up on that person’s lap. Now I know that there is something special about me, the double blessing of being attractive to mosquitoes AND being allergic to them.

I sometimes wonder if I would have turned out very different without this allergy. As a kid I loved to wander through the woods, but sometimes it just wasn’t worth going outside. Perhaps I would have turned into some kind of extreme outdoorsman, Maybe my current geekdom is the result of those annoying little bugs.