I don't know anything about your dog.

In high school my family had an exchange student. She had the perfect level of English fluency - the level of French fluency I hope I have - where everything she said was technically right, but sometimes just a little tiny bit wrong.

The best example is one morning she looked down at our dog and asked: “Is your dog a man?”

“He’d like to think so,” I said.

Our dog’s name is McGee, and he is a man. But if people think he’s a girl, or a woman, I don’t correct them. 

If someone says “She's so cute” I don't correct them, they're right. My dog is pretty cute, I think. The "she" part doesn't matter so much to me. Dogs aren't boys. Dogs aren't girls. Dogs are dogs, to me.

If someone says “Why does she smell that way?” I don’t say it's because he’s a man and that’s what men smell like. I usually just say that we don’t wash him very often. The groomer said he has sensitive skin so we’re not supposed to. Try standing further away if it bothers you. Or stand upwind maybe. 

It’s ok that our dog is sensitive. Our dog doesn’t care if you call him a him or a her. I'm almost positive our dog doesn't subscribe to any traditional or even non-traditional gender norms. All I really know is he’ll lick up his own pee if we don’t move him along fast enough. Licking pee is something our dog avidly subscribes to.

Wikipedia says that being soft, dependent, and emotional are feminine characteristics and my dog is all these things. If you count leg-humping as being sexually aggressive, that’s a masculine trait. But if you count leg-humping as flirtatious, then it's feminine. Our dog has a few different styles of leg-humping for different occasions.

The point is if you have a great dog, and I bet you do, I’ll want to ask “Can I pet him” or “Can I pet her” and honestly I can’t tell if your dog is a boy or a girl, so I’m going to have to guess.

And I’ll probably be wrong and you’ll probably correct me, and that’s fine, but I won’t really get it.

I don't think your dog cares. And I think your dog smells great.

Killer whales will break your heart

I like whales, but that’s not news. 

Everyone on earth should like whales. Because they’re amazing and beautiful and smooth, because they sing, because a whale tongue weighs as much as a bus, and because whales aren’t just sitting around waiting for you. Whales aren’t like that.

Whales are the celebrities of the sea. Whales are running errands, falling in love, making mistakes and chasing their dreams, just like you and me, but when we see whales we all scream and take thousands of photos and talk about it for the rest of our lives. We see a whale for one minute and it changes us forever. Whales ARE whales, all of the time. 

Anyone can see Beyoncé or take a photo with her but what’s it like to wake up at 2am and BE Beyoncé and have to go to the bathroom? What's it like to know that every time you've met someone that day has been the most memorable day of their life?

These are questions I would know the answers to as soon as I looked a whale in the eye. So I really wanted to see a whale. A killer whale specifically. 

Last weekend we went up to the San Juan Islands to the Olympic Peninsula or to Washington or these might all be the same place. Our boat captain was Captain Matt and his life’s two-part mission to be charismatic and to find killer whales and look at them. Killer whales! He sat in the front of the boat staring through binoculars like a captain from a Wes Anderson film. I’m happy with any whales but I’d love to see killer whales from a Wes Anderson film.

The day went by really fast. And the further we went into the ocean and the smoother the water got and the more free ginger candies I ate, the more I started to realize that the ocean is gigantic. You guys, it’s huge. The ocean is just this enormous immeasurable thing deeper than ever, and in it are about eighty killer whales.

That's seventy-nine more whales than I even need to see, but still not very many.

So we didn’t see any whales but we did see how big the ocean is and isn’t that something?

As Captain Matt wrapped up our tour he did his best to convince us that we’d had an amazing time. He spent several minutes on the loudspeaker assuring us how much fun we’d had. 

“Remember we saw that eagle? We all loved that. We didn't see any killer whales but remember those seals? Remember when we saw a harbor porpoise in the distance? That sure was something to see. We really did have fun today, we really did have a great, great day.”

The good news is I've had a dormant fear my entire life that some day I'll see a killer whale and it will be so great I'll have nothing else to look forward to and no reasons left to exist. A fear that seeing a killer whale is the nature-sighting equivalent of doing meth, and I'll keep looking for that high again and never find it until one day I'm just lying in a ditch whispering about orcas to myself. That fear seems legitimate.

And the other good news is it seems like there's a small chance that some killer whales might have seen us, and I hope it changed their life forever.

Have you ever seen a killer whale? Please tell me everything.

Have you ever seen the movie Blackfish? I haven't but I want to.

Name something that weighs ten pounds

Guys should I adopt this dog? Here I three reasons I probably should.

1. My landlord said he prefers if I don't have pets BUT he said it so gently that I think he would love this one.

2. Last week I saw a free fish tank WITH FISH on Craigslist and before I had time to decide good idea or bad idea it was gone. So maybe from now on I should assume everything is a good idea.

3. He looks like Paddington. The dog does, not my landlord.