Walking home today I realized I could do some interesting things with my camera that I never experiemented much with before, namely leaving the shutter open longer when it’s darker w/ a special attention to passing cars and traffic lights.

Sounds kinda silly, but when I first saw these photos, I felt a school-girlish giddiness come over me. I haven’t really seen this type of photo done by pros, but I imagine it’s truly mindblowing when done by someone with a little experience. Anyways, I surely enjoyed them!

I still remember where I was when I “heard” – I felt like I was in some bootleg Lifetime movie when I learned that I had “scabies”
“What the hell are scabies?” I asked myself and others. One of those “others” was my friend WebMD who had this to say To paraphrase, it’s some type of mini-mite that lives on the warm parts of peoples body, this is the good part, under your skin. Wow, that is nasty, how did I acquire this filthy plague? Turns out it was innocently passed, friend to friend to friend, very sneaky indeed.

Well, you can’t really see the actual scabies themselves, they are ultrasmall and comfortably reside below your skin. According to artists’ renditions and microscopical photographs, they are quite nasty brutes indeed. The telltale sign of scabies is that they cause little incredibly itchy bumps. It’s your body’s reaction to the mites that causes the bumps and itchiness, cool!

It’s somewhat terrible to realize that scabies cannot be treated in any other method than the horrible cream immersion I will soon describe and that it apparently would go one thriving on my ever-so-supple flesh. I heard from a fellow sufferer that it used to involve a ‘lye-dip’, nice

So, the doctor I first saw was (sawwas?) pretty cool. I was like “I have scabies” And she said “Yes, yes you do. Apply this cream and wash every posession” The cream was pretty uncool. It starts as a very light creamy toothpaste that you vigorously massage into all parts of your body. The whole time you are doing this you will likely think “If I need to get a prescription for this medicinal salve, because nothing else is strong enough to kill the beasts & I am supposed to cover my entire body with it… who is that possibly safe?”

Of course the alternative is living with an everpresent gnawing itch that quickly spreads to every imaginable region of your body, thankfully leaving out a few “choice” areas. A night of the cream therapy and a washing of all of your clothing later and you should be scabies-free! I washed everything washable and put everything else away for a few days (apparently they can’t live more than 3 days away from their hosts!) Right away I started to feel better, happy to be alive and scabies-free!

Sadly, three weeks after the treatment, I have again been infected by these vile monsters. Interestingly enough, they are in all different areas now, the original areas are still relatively scabies-free (and proud).

I’m at a loss to provide a moral here, what a nice young fellow like myself has done to deserve this, so I will leave you with a pictures that equal in excess of 2000 words:

Front

Back

Sorry I have been so lame.

I mean, I am basically just apologizing to myself, for letting the other part of myself down, but my lackluster writing as of late has been… disheartening.

Where is funny ole mailroom nate? Or psuedo-geekish IT nate? Or simple misguided philosophy major nate?

Please come back