better than anything else that i've found

there's a war going on this week and i regret that no blood has been spilled yet. megan vs the mosquitoes. i've been waking up with little red randomly placed bumps and i thought it was a spider in my bed or something for a long time, but this week i've spotted a mosquito in my room.
the bites are tiny and red and only some of them art itchy. it's odd.

so far my only defenses have been my fan.. which i was hoping would make it impossible for them to fly around me?.. and my blankets up to my chin. i thought i was winning the war with that one until i woke up with several itchy red dots on my neck, face and forehead.
tonight i brought out the vitamin B1 i brought with me just for this problem. it's official function is to help your body break down glucose, but one of my coworkers at the publishing company swore by it as a natural mosquito repellent. we'll see how it goes.
these are the books i'm reading now. i used to be a one-book girl, and i thought i was taking on some ADD tendencies for a bit, but i realized the method to my madness yesterday. at home, i used to read for half an hour before bed to calm down and get sleepy.

but here i've been reading before class, on the bus, during the day and mostly at the coffee shop. those places are all so distracting that i don't want to waste my really good books on them, so i've been reading fluffy travel books in public and saving my favorites for my quiet, before bed time.
i just started Outliers by malcom gladwell (the same man who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink) and it's really interesting. the first chapter is how we think of success as being about being lucky and naturally talented, but that science can explain a lot more than we realize. apparently it's good to be the oldest you can be for anything with a cutoff date.

he talks about how pro hockey players are overwhelmingly born in january-march because they were slightly ahead as kids since they were bigger so they got picked for the better teams and got more practice and it snowballs from there. same with gifted and talented kids. it's an interesting book.

nothing of note today except that noe moved out of the dorm today. he had quit at our school, gotten hired/rented an apartment in taipei, decided against it and started applying around taoyuan, but the other day he decided he just wanted to go home. he was getting frustrated feeling like it was too repetitive and the hours are kind of wacky. i'm going to miss him though, he was my dose of texas in taiwan. he left me with 4 cans of enchilada sauce though! fiesta this weekend.