not surprising

I saw you - you look like a swimmer

Last year I made a New Year’s resolution to learn to swim.

I didn’t really intend to keep it, I guess. I don’t put much stock in resolutions generally, using them more as guidelines or wistful ideas rather than concrete goals with hard-and-fast twelve month deadlines. I vaguely thought I might sign up for swim lessons at the Embarcadero Y, but they were like $200 so I kept putting it off – apparently, acquiring the ability to not drown when faced with over-my-head water was not worth fifty trips to Jamba Juice.

But it’s embarrassing not being able to swim. Everyone just expects you can (“Didn’t you grow up on the West coast?”), and when you have to raise your hand when the kayak tour guide wants to know who he needs to pay careful attention to so he doesn’t get sued, it gets a little old. Also maybe it would help out with the whole phobia thing? So I thought I should probably at least make an effort, or pretend like I might think about making an effort. Classic resolution approach, there.

On the very last day of 2011, without even thinking about my “resolution,” I learned breast stroke. Joel gave me some pointers and I managed to swim from one end of my little Thai rooftop pool to the other and called it a win. I didn’t even realize until we were all talking about resolutions for 2012 later that night that I’d actually fulfilled mine for 2011. I could do it! I could move myself around in water!

My new skills were put to the test three days later on a sailing + snorkeling trip around the islands in Phang Nga Bay, in Southern Thailand. Suddenly I had to swim around in real water, with real salt, where real sharks sometimes eat people (in that movie The Beach, anyway), and put my real face in the water and look around at that really terrifying world.

I was not the most confident. Looking in the water was hard - I wouldn’t even do it the first day - but when on the second day we started out from the shore in water I could stand in (thus not likely to have many sharks), I bit the bullet and floated around to look at fishes for a little while. It was nice! Still scary, I wouldn’t go out very far and almost definitely ruined Joel’s fun making him babysit me, but it was a huge step. The next day I went in deeper water with some of the most beautiful fish I have ever seen - and it was hard, and scary, and I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have given it was some of the best snorkeling Joel’s family had ever seen - and it was great.

This is such a huge step forward! I have been so crippled not being able to swim, so many fun things I’ve never done. So now I have to practice practice and get better and less scared. Big steps. 2012 is going to be a good year.

Shark Week

Well, I guess it’s shark week. Somehow I never seem to see this coming, even though it’s the same week on the Discovery Channel every year, right? I clearly can’t go research it because any reputable source is bound to be swarming with pictures I don’t want to see. So if anyone has information about shark week scheduling that they’re willing to share with me sans photographic evidence, I’d appreciate it. 

Anyway, every year the internet is insistent that I—and I tried to use the word “conscientious” here but it just didn’t sound believable—pathological avoider of all things shark, should be kept quite highly aware that IT’S SHARK WEEK OMG through media I typically deem safe. Everywhere I turn there are unwelcome glimpses that I have to hurriedly minimize or scroll past or just put my hands in front of my face to avoid. Stupid shark week! I hate you. For the moment, I also hate:

Etsy

I signed on today to a full front-page feature on all shark-related projects available on the popular handmade and vintage products marketplace. Whoopee! How exciting! Maybe I should buy myself a t-shirt with a shark riding a vintage Peugeot or a Great White plushie made of recycled felt. Perfect.

Tumblr

Okay, so this one I remembered from last year, and it hasn’t actually happened yet this year, but that’s probably because I’m spending around 1/10 the time I used to on Tumblr right now. Anyway: people on Tumblr effing love sharks. So the Tumblr Radar is almost constantly SHARK PICTURES during shark week, and sometimes—I know this seems impossible—when it’s not even shark week. The dumbest one I can recall is some picture of what looked like Playmobil sharks chomping their way through cartoon water. Super weird. Why would you even feature that, Tumblr radar? It was hardly as remarkable as the picture I posted on the same day of the incredible deep dish pizza I made from scratch (even the crust!). Gimme some love, Tumblr Radar!

Facebook

I spent a good amount of time at work today “liking” all the other forestry/conservation/economic development/land rights organizations that have Fan Pages on facebook to encourage more people to “like” our page. Of course, these are conservation organizations, and apparently some people think certain shark populations need to be saved from the fate they escaped some millions of years ago when the rest of the dinosaurs (the ones that didn’t make a secret pact with the devil) perished. Anyway. I clicked through to the website of one such conservation organization and was greeted with a cheery picture of a family of hammerhead sharks drifting peacefully through the winedark sea. AUGH. Scrollscrollscroll goes my mouse.

Which leads me to…

The Nature Conservancy

Okay, maybe I should have seen this one coming. I learned at a very early age that I couldn’t trust National Geographic—of the stacks of hundreds of copies of the magazine stretching back to 1952 piled in my childhood room when we first moved in, I swear fully 1/3 of them featured Gaping Maw covers or hid Shadowy Depths (Now With Extra Teeth!) features throughout the pages. National Geographic feels the same way the Tumblr population does about sharks: it effing loves them. So I probably should have known The Nature Conservancy wasn’t really any safer. As I giddily “liked” my way through page after page of conservation organizations, I clicked through to the Conservancy’s page – which had just linked to a YouTube video called “Great White (something?) Dance” in honor of the Holy Week. I scrolled down in a panic too quickly to see what kind of dance it was doing, but suffice it to say it was not a dance I was interested in watching performed. Unless that shark is actually Michelle Obama doing the Dougie, I’m not interested. 

Another year, another shark week. I always make it through, obviously, and it probably actually makes me stronger, getting all these jittery jolts of nerves every so often. This from the girl who voluntarily watched all four Jaws movies (are there more than four? I don’t remember. I watched at least four) and then complained that she needed to sleep with the light on because her overactive imagination wouldn’t stop replaying the moves on the darkened walls of her room. Youth! Wasted on the irrationally fearful!

I think that’s part of the whole phobia package though: with an irrational fear comes an equally, or perhaps more irrational attraction to the feared thing. I wanted to watch those movies; and when I see a picture of a shark I feel a compulsion to look at it again (a compulsion I usually do not act on). Maybe it’s kind of like how fear of falling and the desire to fall are all wrapped up in one another. We have this curiosity about something we know, or we think we know, to be dangerous or deadly, and that curiosity is attractive. That still doesn’t mean I’ll happily go to the Aquarium of the Bay, but I will ask what their teeth look like when you see them up close. My guess is “bloodthirsty.”