hammerhead sharks and pineapples

November 14, 2014

when i was little, i saw a hammerhead shark for the first time and said 'wow, that’s a cool shark--not my favorite shark, but a cool shark.'  i accepted that the weird-looking shark with the T-shaped-face like no other creature on earth was the hammerhead shark. from that point on, it never wowed me. until just now, while sitting here thinking about them, what in the heck ever caused a hammerhead shark’s face to develop into that shape. the mouth isn’t incredibly accessible to the meat of its prey, and it’s t-shape certainly isn’t hydro/aerodynamic. it’s strange to think about.

My thoughts later-- 01/04/16:

The same can be said for pineapples.  A pineapple is such a beautiful freak.  It is ugly and coarse on the outside, and even in all its delectable flavor, when opened and chewed the fibers cling to each other, making you work through the toughness to truly wring out all the sweetness onto your tongue.   And one day, you are told that this weird looking flavor bomb is a pineapple, and a pineapple is a fruit.

You learn what a fruit is at a young age, that there is a family of fruits, and then you learn about all of the fruits--maybe not in that order, but I bet.  As you grow older, you learn to associate certain fruits to their sweetness and their color.  You learn that they are sugary, even healthy.  Maybe you see more exotic fruits as you grow older, but they are immediately put into your fruit compartment of your mind and eventually you desensitize yourself to the idea of fruits.  

How did we ever let go of the magnificence of a fruit?  They are sugary ovaries.  They are varied in multitudes of texture, skins, indigenous locations, flavors, colors, flesh, etc.  They can be very different from each other (eg- a kiwi from an apple), yet we always lump them together.  This is where the point I am making about pineapples comes in.

What the hell is a pineapple?  Who was the first to try one?  Was it perfect when he or she tried it?  A pineapple's integrity is held by the perfect conditions of ripeness, or otherwise it is tart and chewy.  Also, it is ugly--if I were walking past one, I would keep walking.  It's like a mini-tree aggressively poking out of the ground, daring any soft hands to touch it, to remove it from its place and explore the depths beneath its spiny skin.  

I used to hate pineapples.  I thought they looked alien when I was younger, and when my grandmother would serve me canned slices, I always found them unsavory.  As a picky eater, if I didn't like something immediately, I would go years without trying it again.  I just did as others do with pineapples, lump them as a fruit, but for my own personal preference, put them at the bottom of my list for likable fruits.  

I don't remember when or where it was that I had my first taste of a pineapple and changed my mind, but it was Xmas Eve when I really started to examine one sitting on my step mother's kitchen island.  I determined that I had come a long way with pineapples, as they've now reached my echelon of favorite fruits, but not just because of their flavors, since I am still new to knowing when one is ready to be eaten.  However, just staring at this fruit mesmerized me.  It is unlike any other fruit which I can picture--its tree-like nature, its precarious conditions for flavor and texture, the fact that it is one big ovary shrouded in alligator skin, its 90's cartoon hairstyle.  The pineapple is truly one of a kind, unlike its other fruit counterparts which hang aplenty.  The pineapple is truly a beautiful freak.