"So Sharky"

When asked how I planned to spend my last week of summer vacation, I responded with a rousing "SHARK WEEK!" at which my friend eyed me like I was a loon.  If you haven't been following my posts thus far, here's a refresher on my personality: I'm a cheerful but reserved girl who spends her days watching Sherlock, Chuck, and Cake Boss and admiring her stacks of hardbound classics--not the type normally pegged as a shark-lover.  I feel, therefore, an explanation is warranted, and therein lies the topic for this blog post (a little outside my ordinary theme set, but Spawn of Jaws: The Birth put me in the mood).  Before any of you start gagging, I do not watch sharks for the pleasure of seeing them tear their prey to pieces: I'm not really a blood-and-guts kinda gal.  What attracts me to these creatures is their majesty: wolves are lean, kittens are cute, but few animals are truly fierce in the way that sharks are.  Their paradoxical combination of elegance and murderous bloodlust fascinates me: it's like finding out a classy lady in a skintight cocktail dress is packing a submachine gun.  Their sleek, slim builds glide silkily through the water--even the Great Whites possess a certain grace.  Were they not laden with razor-edged teeth, I might describe them as delicate, or at the very least balletic: their crisp movements and lithe bodies that can u-turn on a dime--they're fine dancers in the water.  Set dinner before them, and no longer do they lazily slip by: they perform a curious underwater lunge at their prey, larger Great Whites even known to perform spectacular jumps in their effort to secure a meal.  Graceful hardly describes them then: the sheer power they exhibit erases the subtle beauty they possessed moments before--they are the reapers of the deep.  That delicate balance of power and grace contained in one animal is what drives me to watch them: I love that transition from apparently docile to hunger-mad, to see what is beautiful become gruesome, only to return to the former after mealtime.  It is the contrasting elements, the beauty within the beast, that prompted my enthusiastic response to my friend's question of how I would spend my remaining week of free time.