Jaws" and succeeding shark movies have always depicted the Great White Shark as behaving like a bully, showing its fin above-water for panic effect, biting a victim and dragging him away while he screams and waves to his friends, and ramming small boats until they capsize.
This "bully" behavior is based on isolated accounts. Great White Sharks have been known to be playfully malicious with their prey, but they munch them slowly, and they tend to encircle their victims a lot, unlike their adrenaline-filled counterparts in the movies. Therein lies your chance to escape. There is a self-defense tip wherein you use your fingers on the attacker's eyes. It works against sharks, too. So, when a Great White lunges at your torso, take big gulps of air before you are forcibly submerged. The pain will be excruciating, as your hips and ribs are crushed. Persevere, squint underwater, find one of the shark's eyes. Now, make a fist, but stick out your thumb. Thumb that angry fish's eye repeatedly, with all your strength. The shark will either be annoyed and spit you out, bloodied and mangled and all, or it will hasten the crushing motion of its jaws.
Two possibilities now emerge. If you've been spat out, the shark will either be annoyed and will come at you again, this time making sure to chew its food well and quick, or it will be seriously hurt and will swim away. If you have some, long nails really help.
If the shark spat you out and then swam away, leaving you bleeding, you may still be able to swim to the surface and wave for help, thus increasing your chances of survival. However, pray that help comes quickly, for that blood trail you left will attract other sharks. And you will not survive a feeding frenzy, long nails or no.
However, if the shark spat you out and intends to come at you again, this is what will happen. You either have a moment before you are mangled for the last time, or the shark will swim around you, like a villain who has underestimated his prey and intends to take no more chances.
In the latter case, remember to look brave, until you black out--either due to your spine being crushed, or due to lack of oxygen. Go back to that fist with your thumb sticking out. This time, pull back your thumb and stick out your middle finger. Watch the shark coming at you. Face it. Show it that finger.
Watch the shark hesitate for a moment. You have gained its respect.
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When my head's not swirling due to deadlines and the slight fever they trigger, Kerima Polotan keeps me company:
"Sunday comes like a benediction. All week long, life is a rush and a nightmare; you kill yourself trying to beat the alarm clock, to make the deadline, to get to the corner before the traffic jam; or, if you don't have to go anywhere, you hurry everyone out of the house; children to school, husband to work, maid to market, only to prepare for that mad hour when they come rushing back home so you can stuff them with supper and put them to sleep to renew strength for that sprint our of the house the following day. But Sunday lifts the pressure suddenly and one of its little luxuries is to let the alarm clock ring and ring and ring while you turn around and burrow into your pillow for some more sleep."
Her prose seems to come right out of nowhere, and now that it's here, you don't want to it go away. But it's gone, whatever it is, and you struggle to read and reread to get more of that magic you think belongs to the words, and it does, as much as it belongs, too, to the spaces between them, and somehow, you think, you want to document life like that: so mundane, so familiar, with a sense of things passing, never being what they used to, except maybe in memory.
"I bought our bread there from a woman who must have been born old, or it was probably just the flour on her hair and face she never completely washed off. A bakery affects me the way a jewelry store affects other women, I guess--I stand there surrounded by trays of cakes and rolls, inhaling deeply, and I cannot quite make out exactly how I feel, as I am distracted by doors opening in my mind through which darts this little girl with her wild curls and her dark knees, clambering up a stool to point with a dirty wet coin at her favorite bun."
I want to just catalogue life like that, in its slow, inching crawl to wherever it's headed, never worrying about plot, everything just a swirl of what I see and hear and touch and what's out there, moving and shouting and standing still, dying, resentful, happy, obscene, naive, benign and evil--all at the same time.
So yeah. Nice book.
"Sunday comes like a benediction. All week long, life is a rush and a nightmare; you kill yourself trying to beat the alarm clock, to make the deadline, to get to the corner before the traffic jam; or, if you don't have to go anywhere, you hurry everyone out of the house; children to school, husband to work, maid to market, only to prepare for that mad hour when they come rushing back home so you can stuff them with supper and put them to sleep to renew strength for that sprint our of the house the following day. But Sunday lifts the pressure suddenly and one of its little luxuries is to let the alarm clock ring and ring and ring while you turn around and burrow into your pillow for some more sleep."
Kerima Polotan, "The Joys of Sunday,"
Adventures in a Forgotten Country
(UP Press, 1999, p. 117)
Adventures in a Forgotten Country
(UP Press, 1999, p. 117)
Her prose seems to come right out of nowhere, and now that it's here, you don't want to it go away. But it's gone, whatever it is, and you struggle to read and reread to get more of that magic you think belongs to the words, and it does, as much as it belongs, too, to the spaces between them, and somehow, you think, you want to document life like that: so mundane, so familiar, with a sense of things passing, never being what they used to, except maybe in memory.
"I bought our bread there from a woman who must have been born old, or it was probably just the flour on her hair and face she never completely washed off. A bakery affects me the way a jewelry store affects other women, I guess--I stand there surrounded by trays of cakes and rolls, inhaling deeply, and I cannot quite make out exactly how I feel, as I am distracted by doors opening in my mind through which darts this little girl with her wild curls and her dark knees, clambering up a stool to point with a dirty wet coin at her favorite bun."
"This Way to the Museum" (Polotan, 1999, p. 131)
I want to just catalogue life like that, in its slow, inching crawl to wherever it's headed, never worrying about plot, everything just a swirl of what I see and hear and touch and what's out there, moving and shouting and standing still, dying, resentful, happy, obscene, naive, benign and evil--all at the same time.
So yeah. Nice book.
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