That sounds frightening but awesome. I'm kinda fascinated by jellyfish.
The few hundred smaller ones didn't help, ha. I didn't get stung, somehow, but being surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of dreadfully painful things is... unsettling. And somewhat psychologically lingering, heh. Not as badly as the boat thing, but eh.
You're in Florida, right? I admit, I'd be much more hesitant about swimming there.
Yeah. And eeehhh, I think we only lose a couple people a year at the most. Mortality rate's not high, iirc. More afraid of you than you are of them, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes. Water moccasins'll chase yer arse down, occasionally.
I can understand the appeal of pools if you're into that kind of thing. I just can't do it. To be conscious and not actively engaged in something is infuriating to me. Hell, to be unconscious is infuriating to me, because it prevents me from being actively engaged in something. I hate sleep because I hate to stop doing things.
Eh, was more or less a survival skill for me. Not being able to disconnect and shut the brain up for a while would have been worse for my sanity than, well, how things did go down. Took... probably a decade of somewhat intermittent, but fairly dedicated, practice to get the trick(s) to it. Occasionally irritation like you're talking about tries to rear its head, but I just ask myself, "Is being irritated going to help? Is it going to change the situation or improve my enjoyment of it? No? No." and that's that.
Water, though... s'just something about the weight shift involved in being buoyant or summat. S'very attention grabbing, for me, in... I guess you'd call it a diffuse sort of way? Not so much "engaged" as "subsumed". Like being an
incredibly high cat with an infinitely wiggling string comfortably in reach. Lazily batting the string = water. Takes a lot for me to get bored when I'm in the water. Usually get sunburnt and wrinkled first.