Sharks and Me

Obviously this isn't a shark, but it was taken at the Long Beach Aquarium, where there is a large shark tank, and I'm trying to make an attempt to use only my own photos in this blog as of recently (shout out to those other people that took the photos I used). Anywho, onto the real deal.

I suppose sharks fall into my interests somewhere in between animal intelligence and disasters. They are intelligent, they are animals, and they can be disasters. I'm not sure where this particular intrigue began - perhaps when I was in high school and I caught Jaws on television. Quite riveting indeed. I know it was bad for sharks as a whole, and I know it's a cliched movie to love, but too bad, I do.

In college, a friend of mine had a screening for Deep Blue Sea. What a terrific film. So over the op ridiculous, so well done. One of my friends watching it was a devotee of Discovery's Shark Week, which I then got into.

I'm not ... afraid of sharks. I don't really have to be, I'm afraid of the ocean first (I almost drowned in the undertow at fourteen and our relationship has never been the same, I'm sad to say). I find them fascinating, these creatures of a world I'll never know. I really loved a book titled "The Devil's Teeth" which is about not only great white sharks, but also about obsession and the Farralon Islands, which, despite living in the Bay Area from ages three to seventeen, I had no idea existed. I also started reading "Close to Shore," but didn't finish it before the library wanted it back. It talked about how there had been this period of time in the 1800s in America where people were too busy and/or modest to go swimming in the ocean, and so it fell out of fashion. In that period of a hundred years before, we as humans simply forgot about sharks. Then in the early 1900s, ocean swimming came back into style and suddenly were being eaten by these horrible monsters. Can you imagine? Forgetting about sharks. How fascinating. I need to finish that book. And the other four or five that I'm reading. READ ALL THE BOOKS!

Anywho, sharks are a thing I like. I want to know more about them. I want to know more about most things, but sharks are near the top.