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.

Summer is the worst

It's the time of year where I start freaking out about summer being almost over. There are probably only nine weeks left of it if I'm being incredibly generous, eighteen weekend days and you'll definitely waste four of them so really just two weeks of summer left.

It makes me sad and then I think "If I'm sad, that will be a waste of summer" and that makes me even sadder.

The only thing that makes me happier is taking out the garbage. Because to take out the garbage I have to go down this little locked alleyway behind my building, where two baby birds fell out of a nest a few weeks ago and have just been slowly decomposing. Maybe I was supposed to bury them when I first noticed their bodies, but I didn't and neither did anyone else, and now it's so hot and they're just slowly baking on the sidewalk like the grossest barbecue I've ever seen. 

I have to take wide steps around the birds and then I have to carefully maneuver the garbage can area because ever since summer started half a dozen huge spiders have started building this complicated six-part web, and they're using half the garbage cans as anchor points. You have to pull some Ocean's 12-type moves to navigate through them without any of the spiders freaking out at you, and Ocean's 12 was the worst Ocean's movie and I only like spiders from a safe distance, and after I throw away my trash and walk back through the birds I can't wait for summer to be over and thank goodness there are only pretty much two weeks of it left.

Go to the beach while you can, you guys.

How often do you floss.

Usually when you’re talking to a stranger you’re not allowed to ask them many personal questions. 

You can ask a stranger what time it is, you can ask them for directions or how soon the bus is coming. That's about it.

But everything changes when a stranger asks you a question - then you get to ask it back to them. It’s a free pass and I love it. I love when people ask how many siblings I have, because then I get to find out how many siblings they have. I love when strangers ask where I’m going, how I cut my hand, or what I’m ordering at a restaurant. The best thing a stranger can ask me is how much I pay for rent.

But the worst thing is when there’s a reason that stranger is asking you the question, so you can’t ask them back, even though you feel like you should be able to. Like when a nurse asks if the veins in my arm are close to the skin. Suddenly I want to ask her the same thing, so badly. It only seems fair. 

Or when my hairstylist asks how long it usually takes for my hair to air dry, I can feel my mouth wanting to say “What about your hair, how long does your hair take to dry?” and I have to bite my tongue to keep my mouth from asking. Biting my tongue reminds me that I never got to ask my dentist how often he flosses.

Bouncers at concerts ask my age, police officers ask where I’m headed, my credit card company asks me my salary, and none of these questions are questions I can ask back. I’ll probably never know what kind of veins my nurse has, where my pharmacist stores her medications, or if my doctor has had any unexpected weight loss recently. 

If my landlord is reading this: Ever since you asked if I own an aquarium or a keyboard I have been dying to know if you own either. And if you own a keyboard, how many keys does it have, and do you use headphones with it or not? Also, this weekend I noticed a new closet in the apartment that I have never seen before. It sounds crazy but it's probably some sort of portal or maybe the previous tenants held a seance. Did the previous tenants own an aquarium? Please respond ASAP.

While I wait I'll be watching this.

Name any place in the world

My sister has the same initials as me but is better at running than me, better at making scrambled eggs than me, and probably smells better than me, and she’s getting an envelope in the mail any Wednesday now that says where she will live for the next year and half while she’s on a mission. 

For some reason the envelope will definitely arrive on a Wednesday. We know that, but we don't know where she'll be going.

She could go anywhere in the world! Except North Korea. And a few other places. But other than that, anywhere in the world. It makes me so excited I can’t eat, but then every few hours it makes me so excited I eat lots, so it evens out.

Can you imagine my sister being gone for a year and a half? I guess first you have to imagine me having a sister. If you already know my sister, you have a head start on imagining this. My sister’s name is Bryn.

A year and a half is a long time. Sometimes I think of a good joke and am about to say it to my sister, but then I think, I’ll save that joke and tell it to her when she’s gone. That way the joke can cheer her up after a hard day in Botswana or Iowa or Iceland or the Maldives, or anywhere, anywhere in the world. Except North Korea. And a few other places. 

Here are ten of the thousands of places Bryn could possibly go:

Neft Dashlari a city built on some boats floating off the coast of Russia or something.

Somewhere with tapeworms I want to hear more about them.

A 21-Jump-Street-style mission where she goes to high schools every day and pretends to be a student.

Florence, Italy This is my grandmother’s vote. My grandmother has it on good authority that girls usually go where their dads go, and my dad went to Italy. This sounds about as reasonable as the theory that men only go bald if their mom’s dad went bald, but I think some scientists proved that recently, so this one might actually be pretty accurate. 

One of those states no one can remember when they’re trying to name all 50 states.

Tokyo, Japan If my sister goes to Japan I will be as excited as that dog in the YouTube video that sees his owner for the first time in 2 years and gets so excited he passes out. I’m not posting a link because the video itself was pretty underwhelming.

Marseille, France

Just the rainforest Is that a thing? I hope so.

Canada Everyone in my family has dual Canadian-American citizenship and we all talk a big game about being Canadian but if my sister spent a year and a half there she would honestly know infinitely more about Canada than the rest of us combined.

Portland, Oregon I would get to see her every day.

I miss you already Bryn. Mostly because you already live in another time zone but also because I love you a ton.

Why are you reading in the bathroom.

It's 2014 and a lot of mysteries have been solved: the sun's general whereabouts, how worms pee, ice cubes, but there's one thing no one has any idea about and I think it's because we're all too nervous to ask.

Why is everybody keeping so many books next to the toilet?

Books are great, and I like reading as much as the next person. My family has a friend who stores books in her dishwasher because she washes dishes by hand anyway and needs the extra book storage space. Books in the dishwasher is pretty weird, but it makes more sense to me than books in the bathroom. And I see books in bathrooms all the time.

I have three theories:

THEORY 1: EPIC JOURNEY 

I've always assumed that people must be taking so incredibly long to use the bathroom that they need to prepare for it the way they would for a long commute or a journey west or a trip to outer space. 

They're bringing reading material because they're going in not knowing when they're coming back out.

Why they're in there so long I have no idea. Lack of fiber? Too much fiber? Very long digestive tracts? Those have question marks but they're not questions, I don't really want to know the answers.

astronaut suicides by Sara and Neil

THEORY 2: OVERACHIEVERS

I was talking to my mom on the phone a few months ago about people who have it all together, who are going to school while working and keeping plants alive and wearing mascara and she's not into those people. My mom says some people need to learn to take it easy.

"I went to someone's house the other day," she said, "and there was a book in the bathroom. A book in the bathroom how sad is that, even the two minutes it takes you to sit there and go to the bathroom needs to be useful multitasking time you can spend getting a page ahead in your book. Why can't people just take two minutes off from it all and go to the bathroom."

I have a few additional suggestions for people who read in the bathroom because they like multitasking.

• Do squats instead of sitting so that you strengthen your leg muscles
• Check your arms and any other visible skin for unusual moles
• Recite the Greek alphabet twice while you wash your hands
• Also use that hand-washing time to check your teeth in the mirror in case there's salad in them.

THEORY 3: SECRET HIDEOUT

I think sometimes people want to play Candy Crush and Words with Friends and their real-life friends are tired of them being on their phone so they stay in the bathroom forever. Like the guy in This is 40. Maybe that wasn't This is 40. Whatever movie that was.

Actually it was This is 40, here is proof.

He's playing Words with Friends. See that tea light on the back of the toilet? I have so many questions about bathrooms.

Anyway, maybe some people are the same with magazines and finance books? Maybe they're just looking for a quiet place they can read with their pants down because people won't leave them alone.

We'll never know.