Happy Shark Week

It’s Shark Week. Wait, let me rephrase that: Can you believe it’s already the season when we as a society devote an entirely unwarranted week to sharks? I know I’ve questioned this before, but isn’t every week “Shark Week” for sharks? They’re f-cking apex predators. It’s like giving high school quarterbacks a week. Sharks are the dicks of the sea. I have a bone to pick with these cartilaginous scumbags.

We allot 1/52nd of the entire year to sharks. Just let it sink in — and then let it continue sinking until a fish that we, as a nation, spend an inordinate amount of time on devours it. Do you think sharks are thinking this much about us? Have they ever even stopped swimming around for five minutes to thank us for naming the cooler gang after them in West Side Story? No.

And how do we reward this terrible, self-centered shark behavior? We spend a full two percent of our year on them. These sharks must have one powerhouse of a lobby working for them in Washington — backed by all that vacuum cleaner money, I’m sure. In case you were wondering, the rest of the American year is officially divided as follows:

• Two weeks for weight loss schemes
• Two weeks for feeling bad about not achieving goals set in weight loss schemes
• Six weeks for complaining/worrying about our love life
• 12 weeks for Weather
• 2.5 weekends for Patriotism
• Four weeks for the War on Christmas
• 13 weeks for the Olympics (or for reruns of Legally Blond 2: Red, White & Blonde during non-Olympic years)
• .5 weeks for rational thought
• Three weeks for all the different GEICO commercials
• Five weeks for celebrity haircuts
• 1.5 weeks for snack food
• All unallocated time is sold back to the government and then purchased by PACs for political ads and Tumblr

Sharks get a higher percentage of the year than rational thought and almost as much time as snack food! So, just think about that this year when you don your fin-patterned sweaters and make your plankton pie. Sharks really have not earned a full week of our year. Furthermore, they wouldn’t even care if I told them all of this right to their face. I should know; I have done just that multiple times. They didn’t even respond once.

Do sharks really deserve a week of your time spent solemnly lighting the traditional sharktooth-shaped candles, dancing merrily to the theme from Jaws, and kissing friends underneath the old seaweed wreath? Also, isn’t it time to get a fake seaweed wreath? Think about the environment. God knows somebody has to think about it because the sharks aren’t doing a damn thing. When is the last time you heard about a Sierra Club Fundraiser thrown by sharks? Have even one single shark donated money to my “Stop global warming using emotions” Kickstarter? The answer is no.

If you still aren’t convinced that “Shark Week” is a scam, just try to think about the true meaning of the holiday. Remember that “Shark Week” as we know it today was invented by sharks to sell greeting cards. How else do you think they get the money to buy all those fancy shark-skinned suits? You know, the ones they always just happened to be wearing whenever a camera shows up? That’s greeting card money.

The very first celebration of “Shark Week” was just a group of humans and sharks getting together and eating a meal to celebrate the harvest. It was a short meal. Especially considering neither can breathe for very long in the other’s habitat, but it was a meal nonetheless. They lit some sparklers, drank some mead and talked about what really mattered. They enjoyed a simple Shark Week celebration.

Then, a human accidentally cut himself on a toothpick and the sharks gorged on him in a feeding frenzy. The irony is the toothpicks were there primarily for the sharks. Of course, they didn’t even stay to help clean up; they’re f-cking sharks, what did you expect? Happy shark week, assholes.