11:57 PM
The past few days have been a whirlwind. On Saturday, It was, I don't remember the nickname I gave her, oh yeah, Acorn, and it was her last day in PR for a while. Acorn was the person we went to the gym with a week ago, she's only in PR temporarily and she may be back again. Since it was her last day, we went adventuring.
I went to Eric's place to pick them up, and then we went to Frescura, a vegan restaurant in Bayamon, to have lunch. Gus would be there too, he bicycled all the way there from Dorado, which is 40 minutes away bicycling. After eating there Gus would bicycle back to Dorado, another 40 minutes, since his bike wouldn't fit in my car along with all 4 of us in there. Gus is one of the fittest people I know, he is muscular and has defined abs, not just toned, but they pop out. Eric also has abs, but they are just toned and they don't pop out. I don't have any visible abs, neither does Acorn, mine aren't visible because probably have too much fat around them, and for Acorn, she's thin and not toned.
Later, we would go to Dorado to do some vegan activism. Eric has a YouTube channel where he goes around and debates people at the beaches and other places on their ethics. Eric is very passionate about saving animals, so this activity is a passion for him. When I met him, he only had around 400 subscribers or so, and now he has over 1.1k subscribers. I helped in many ways, encouraging him, giving ideas, being in some videos, recording some videos, being the person driving to some places, and so on. His channel is a team activity, not only I, but other people have helped him develop his channel as well.
He does have a certain amount of fame now, which I'll write more about a few paragraphs from now, enough that strangers can recognize him. His channel is still pretty small in the grand scheme of things, but strangers still have been able to recognize him in random places. I am very happy for his growth.
But anyway, so we go to Dorado and this is where I get humbled. We go to a beach behind this hotel there, and he goes and interviews some people. Meanwhile at that same beach, I'm just sitting down on a rock, and there are these insects flying and crawling all around me. They're on my arms and legs, and so I record a video of them. My arms and legs start to feel itchy, as if they're biting me, but I don't think much of it.
Later we go to a bowling place nearby, but they don't have any open slots until 9 PM, which is 2 hours later, so we just go back to the street, and I show them my drone for a bit. I fly my drone a little bit in the beach and the streets, and I show them the footage it's able to capture and where it's able to go. After that, I guess Gus went home, since he lives there, and I drive Acorn and Eric to Lokales, another vegan restaurant, where we ate dinner, then I dropped them off. We were planning on doing more at night, but they decided to call it a day. So that was Saturday.
Now Sunday, is when I get humbled. So I was only on that beach for maybe an hour, but I got eaten alive. I have hundreds of bright red marks on my legs as I write this, and it doesn't itch because I put anti-itch cream on it, but it looks ghastly, horrible, and when it does itch, it itches drastically. This is my third time experiencing noseeum bites, and this is the second worse. The worst was my first encounter with noseeums, when they not only bit my legs, but also my back, the sides of my body, my arms, everywhere. Thankfully there was no or limited scarring from that event, today, as it's been over two years since.
Sunday there was a Pride festival event in Viejo San Juan, and Casa Vegana was going to have a booth there, so we wanted to attend and do some activism. Eric, Gus, and later Guy and I would be at the Pride festival, wearing rainbow flag Pride shirts along with temporary Pride tattoos, and interviewing people. We got the shirts and tattoos from the event itself and just wore them throughout. We were there for around 8 hours, maybe more, and we talked to a lot of people. I talked to people too.
We would start by talking about the Pride event first, asking them about what their flag meant if they carried one and it wasn't a well known one, asking them about themselves, their relation to Pride or LGBTQIA, and so on. We are all heterosexual in the group, but of course we support and accept LGBTQIA.
Everyone there is for peace, compassion, love, and acceptance, so that's usually how I'd start the conversation, just talking about their own definitions of those terms, and how then extend it to animals from there. Unanimously, everyone thinks of themselves as peaceful, compassionate, loving, and accepting, they even think of themselves this way when it comes to animals. Unanimously everyone agrees animals should have their own rights to their life and freedom, and that we shouldn't harm or enslave them. They agree with this until meat is brought up, and then the so-called peaceful, loving, compassionate, accepting person, will then try to argue about how it's fine to torture and kill innocent beings.
Thankfully, this time most people weren't like that. We had conversations with several vegetarians and vegans in fact, and many people who were open to the idea, even people who basically said they'd become vegan on the spot after we talked to them. There was just one guy that was pretty bad, a hunter from Minnesota who says he doesn't buy any factory farm meat and that all his meat was from animals he hunted, as always, this turned out to be a lie when I asked him what he ate here in PR if that were the case. Anyway, that was the only conversation that didn't go well that I can recall, the others ranged from acceptable to good. The entire video is on YouTube.
After that, we ate at this restaurant called Afro Vegana, or something like that. That was where Eric was recognized by a tourist couple from Virginia. They were just visiting, we were mostly done eating when the husband came up to Eric and asked him if this was him, showing Eric his activism YouTube channel on his phone. That was the first time he had been recognized in public by someone not from Puerto Rico, and it was cool. We talked for a while with this couple and got a picture with them too. They didn't recognize any of the rest of us, just him.
Anyway, we go back to Eric's apartment and I show the crew my legs that had been eaten up. I was wearing pants the whole day, so no one could see my legs, but in the car, I rolled up one of my pants' sleeves, and even I was shocked at how red and plentiful these bite marks were. There were hundreds of bites everywhere, it made my leg look disgusting, and it itched like crazy. After this we called it a night, so I headed home.
Before going home, I bought some anti-itch cream from Walgreens, and also some snacks. I was so stressed out I bought around 600 calories of food, just two vegan cookies and a bar, and I'd eat it at home, being so stressed out. I was so stressed out. I actually took a shower first, and I cleaned up my legs. They were so red and itchy. When I dried off my legs with a towel, it felt like euphoria, that I was extremely high. My legs itched so much and there were so many bug bites, that just drying my legs felt euphoric, I felt so numb with pleasure just drying them and "scratching" every itch. It's seriously something I have never felt before and it's not something I am exaggerating.
I would upload photos of my legs, but they are ghastly. It is so horrible to look at. You can just do a search for noseeum bites online, and mine are worse than all of them. It's horrible, and they itched like mad last night after that shower. Anyway, just imagine your entire leg is itching, the strongest itchiest feeling you can imagine, everywhere, all over your legs. Then imagine scratching all of the itch, and it becomes a euphoric feeling. It feels good to scratch a really itchy itch, imagine that times a hundred, and it really felt like I was so high I was going to pass out, just from drying my legs.
Later that night I would scratch and scratch and scratch for minutes, and this would lead to "mini blisters", I don't even know the name for them. A lesion? A cyst? I basically scratched some of these red mounds on my skin enough, that they'd break some part of the skin off, and liquid would ooze out and harden on top of it. I don't know what that's called, but I have that for many of my bites. I couldn't help myself but scratch. It was so itchy. This really humbled me.
My entire world of being in control and calm and having no issues, turned on its head with this one event. I couldn't stop myself from scratching, because it would be so painful if I didn't scratch. The itching feeling was intolerable, and the scratching pleasurable, it was hard to resist. I ate all the foods I bought right away in one sitting, because I was so stressed and feeling out of control. No one could help me either. I felt like I couldn't even go outside wearing shorts anymore, only pants, because my legs looked so unnaturally red from the bug bites, and also the constant itching and discomfort was intolerable too, I felt paralyzed.
I got very humbled with this event here. And yeah, I just hope it doesn't leave any scarring.
I also went on Twitter that night and made a few tweets. I felt like Eric was the star of the show today (Sunday) because his phone lit up with notifications the whole day, he gained probably over 100 new followers today, lots of interactions and posts on his content, lots of people joining his Discord, and so on. I felt my own influence sort of waning, so I made a few tweets just to feel relevant. When I was tweeting, I felt like these posts wouldn't get any views, and that I felt insignificant, but they'd end up getting around 15k views as I write this now, 24 hours later, which is awesome.
So anyway, today, Monday, I just worked the whole day. I was productive and got a decent amount done. I also went to Fresh Mart and I bought some chips and zero calorie soda for me to enjoy. I was so stressed out the whole day today, because of my legs, because of these bite marks.
I learned some very valuable lessons from this though. I should have definitely appreciated my life more prior to these issues. I know scratching it is bad, but it feels so pleasurable, the right decision sometimes feels wrong and the wrong decision sometimes feels right. There are things outside of our control, I literally cannot do anything about these scratches except wait it out for them to stop itching and for them to hopefully fade. That's all I can do in my ability, no amount of money or whatever will solve this issue any faster. I already bought the cream, there's nothing else I can really do about this.
Anyway, that was my day today, and also this weekend. I decided to just write about those days in today's entry instead of making separate entries for those day.
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