Gender is an Ocean. I don’t have a boat.

> me: is it actually trans inclusive or is it just adhering to the gender binary but with trans people forced into the same ridged expectations and assumed positions of power or vulnerablility that cis people are?

> them: what do you mean

> me: *pulls out a chart explaining how gender essentialism is inherently harmful even if you count trans men and women as men and women because the very concepts of man and woman under this framework are so restrictive and reductive that they can not account for the diverse and complex intersectional experiences of trans men/women(or even marginalized cis people) and will also never be able to make a space safe for intersex, nonbinary, and multigender people*

> them: haha it's trans inclusive ma'am- I mean they

> I look inside

> it's ridged adherence to the gender binary

1.) I don’t understand how that can be

2.) But I’ve never done fieldwork from a car before (!!!) so I’ll take your word for it.

“Heeeey”, she said, like someone gently broaching a topic I should have noticed, “Why does the lane next to us have diamond shaped symbols on it?”

That is! A subtle and friendly way of asking why we’re sitting in traffic when there’s a carpool lane Right There! I laughed and pulled into the lane and started driving.

Unfortunately. That isn’t what she was implying, she was genuinely asking. So we were stuck in traffic, she asked about what was clearly a breakdown or emergency access lane, and I laughed and started driving in it. She was Alarmed.

“Hello! Excuse me! We can’t drive in this lane! No one else is driving in this lane!!”

“Oh! I should have said — this lane is for people with more than one person in their car.”

“That is RIDICULOUS. You are lying. You are lying about what this lane is for and we’ll get arrested! (ma’am it’s fine but if it weren’t it would be more of a “ticket” situation) we’ll get a “ticket”! (Ma’am again it’s fine but were it not I alone would get the ticket) because that IS NOT the purpose of this lane. That is a RIDICULOUS lie.”

“I’m sorry, I should have said — I thought you were being subtle about my oversight. Please observe the carpool sign.”

“I don’t know what a carpool is and I don’t believe you.”

“How about you look at all the cars stuck in traffic and see how many have more than one driver, and if there are at least five I’ll get back into the traffic jam.”

“FINE!”

<a pause>

(With dawning horror) “none of these cars have more than one person in them.”

“I know.”

“None of these cars have more than one person!!”

“If you weren’t here I’d be right there with them.”

“OK but there was no train to where we needed to go.”

“There’s no train to where they needed to go either.”

“I know McDonalds and Burger King sell Burgers, but what does Wendy’s sell?”

“Burgers”

“And Sonic?”

“Burgers.”

“Jack in the Box?”

“Burgers.”

“In’n’Out?”

The government wants you to think a shutdown is no big deal. It's is. They want things to keep running in the meantime. They will- but not safely and not paid. Because not everyone is necessarily aware what a shutdown means for Gov workers, this is how it works...

Employees fall into one of the following three categories:

Excepted: Unpaid, required to work (those needed to protect life and property).

Exempted: Paid, required to work (those funded by non-lapsed sources)

Furloughed: Unpaid, employees that are neither excepted nor exempted. These employees have been ordered to "expeditiously complete orderly shutdown activities" then head home. This may be a few minutes for some employees or a few days depending on their job duties and what it takes to perform an "orderly shutdown" of their activities.

Who is furloughed? Legit everyone but "safety" workers. So fees, maintenance, timekeepers, facilities, everybody. And no, those thousands of people will not be paid for whatever amount of time they aren't working.

Who is Exempted? In my neck of the woods (pun intended) it's law enforcement, fire, ems, search and rescue and dispatchers. Hey that sounds like a lot? Guess what - almost all of the law enforcement in the park are simultaneously EMS, search and rescue and the Fire department. One person, four jobs. That's the way... It always is by the way, which is HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC (but that's a different rant). We will keep doing those four jobs, unpaid and unsupported. When will we get paid for our work?- who knows. You may ask yourself - why do we have to keep working when everything is shutdown? Because they're not closing the national parks. Yeah. So people are going to keep coming, keep using the bathrooms that won't be cleaned, keep using the roads that won't be maintained safely, keep getting hurt and in trouble.

Right now, there is a massive rollover DUI car accident on one side of the park and someone just got gored by an animal on the other side of the park. So all of us (the three people on shift at the moment) will be figuring out which one to heading out to. We have to choose. And it's going to be extremely dangerous when we do get on scene because those "non-essential workers" that were furloughed? -Those are the people we count on daily to go above and beyond their own normal duties and help.

Those are the people who manage traffic around the accident for us so we don't get hit. Those are the people that get extra resources for us (lights for night time, blankets, Gatorade if it's a long extraction on scene). Those are the people that make sure we get paid for being called out in the middle of the night, the people that make sure all the protocols are being followed so everyone is safe, the victim advocates that talk to the families, they are the essential hands needed because- if you haven't all forgotten- they already gutted our limping agency staff by like 30%.

What can you do?

What’s new?

Well, for a small group of us first responders, the government has now ordered that we be paid… from our park’s admission fee money fund. The admission fee money fund that is supposed to go directly towards improving the park – fixing roads, cleaning and fixing facilities, visitor experience stuff. The admission fee money fund that’s supposed to cover those improvements for the entire year… Is now being used to pay us. So guess what happens when that runs out? A.) no more pay, B.) no improving the park.

But the parks are still open? So wouldn’t the fees of people still coming in cover part of that? No. Because we’re not allowed to collect fees during the shutdown. The parks are open, not gaining any revenue, burning through their reserves, and becoming significantly more unsafe and generally trashed and destroyed, by the day.

What does that look like?

Last week it was very icy and a tour bus of 50 people slid partially off the road, blocking a whole lane of traffic. This was on the MAIN ROAD, on a blind curve, only 10 miles into the park.

We only have one remaining, non-furloughed plow/sander driver. For reference, we normally have 4-5. He was 50 minutes away (and then the sander broke so he had to go back to the garage for a bit to try and fix it.) The one remaining tow truck driver was almost 90 minutes away. There was only me and my coworker on shift to deal with traffic and we couldn’t direct people around the accident because the road all around it was still icy because the sander hadn’t gotten there and someone was bound to slide off again. So we had to just keep traffic stopped. For almost a two hours, every single visitor to the park was in stopped traffic. About 10 miles worth of cars just sat, parked in the road. Hundreds and hundreds of people.

Some of them turned around to go back to the entrance, but an RV slid off the road going the other way, so now traffic was blocked in both directions. Which meant when the sander WAS fixed, it couldn’t get through the traffic. And because it was just me and my coworker, we didn’t have anybody who could leave the scene of the accident to go down and clear that traffic for the sander.

As I stood there in the cold (thankful that I had pulled my yaktrax out of storage soon enough to use them for the occasion because the road was SOLID ICE) people kept getting out of their cars, coming up to me, and complaining. I’m not allowed to give political opinions at work, but I was able to provide them facts:

Fact: We only have one plow truck driver, because everyone else has been furloughed. If we had our normal amount, all the roads would be sanded and this probably wouldn’t have happened.

Fact: We only have two officers on right now. Usually, we can try to pull some people from other divisions to help with traffic- those people are also furloughed.

Fact: The reason you are in traffic right now is directly caused by the government shutdown.

The main thing I want to communicate to the general public, though, comes from the repeated question I got “Well, if the roads were so dangerous why didn’t you just close the park?”

Ma’am?

Fact: The administration has forbidden us from closing National Parks.

We were ordered to “Continue operations and services as normal”… with at least 65% of our staff furloughed.

Fun epilogue to the story is that 2 hours in, just as the sander and tow truck finally arrived, another car went careening off the road about 30 miles from there, blocking traffic for both lanes. I left one scene and came to that one we discovered the drive was HURT, and needed an ambulance. My coworker and I are also the EMTs/ambulance drivers (and fire department and search and rescue and…) so we had to have our dispatch center start calling people at home to come in and help. (Their overtime won’t be paid until the government restarts by the way).

Five people came in on their day off and we managed to transport to the hospital, do the crash report, clear the road… and deal with SEVEN MORE slide offs in the following two hours.

What are the takeaways from all this complaining I’m doing:

Fact: 65% or more of National Park Service staff that are furloughed and have no income right now. They still have bills though, and some people are in significant trouble financially (because it’s not like they paid us much in the first place).

Fact: Coming to your national park right now is not only extremely dangerous for you, but also causing significant and irreparable damage to the park- to the actual natural resource, to our infrastructure, and to our facilities.

Fact: Parks were ordered to use the finances that we usually would put towards keeping up said facilities and infrastructure, to pay the people we are forcing to work right now. BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FORBIDDEN PARKS TO CLOSE THEIR DOORS AND SHUT THEIR GATES.

Please don't come here. Please contact your local representative. Please spread the word

Because it looks like it's going to be another busy day.

But this… This is something else.

The rapidity of a meme’s introduction to its zenith to its decline is so rapid that in ten years, you’ll need a damn twenty-page manual to explain this. It’ll be as unfunny and hard to explain as jokes in Shakespeare plays, except even more inexplicable because fuck, at least Shakespeare’s jokes are usually about anal or fucking your mother, good wholesome sex jokes we can all get behind.

ok let me see if i can break this down easily. YMCA is the easiest place to start - the song itself has become a meme over time with people changing the lyrics to reference other pop cultural events. so YMCA is meme one (1)

this first lyric replacement (”take the breadsticks and run”) is a reference to the tumblr meme ‘stuffing breadsticks into my purse’. i think everyone remembers that one so i wont bother to explain it. that’s meme two (2)

“man door hand hook car door” is a meme of its own, a creepypasta from i dont remember when. it was a terrible stupid retelling of the generic ‘stuck in a car while hook handed man tries to kill us’ story so the stupid title caught on for memorability. that in and of itself is meme three (3)

‘gun’ is… yeah i dont know how to explain gun. long story short you add gun to the end of a phrase instead of what you expect the last word to be. its shock funny. its everywhere but its popular to add to “man door hand hook car door” for.. some reason? gun is meme four (4)

and the thing is, this four meme combo is something thats gone around before. meme combos are, itself, a meme. which means taking this meme combo and mixing in another meme actually becomes meme five (5)

which leaves us at loss.jpg. loss.jpg was a terrible bad comic supposed to be about some tragic event, but it was presented so poorly literally no one takes it seriously, and for some reason recreating the four-panel setup has become popular. so thats meme six (6)

well i added my contribution : )

The memes here come from the following chains, starting from the bottom right:

This current chain with 35 layers before this.

This chain with 27 layers. By @cerbi-my-babyyyyy

This other chain with 35 layers. By @gay-girl-thing

This particular chain with 28 layers. By @thewintercavalier

Another chain with 27 layers. By @be-gay-cause-crime

This particular chain with 29 layers. By @theforgowolf

Yet another chain with 27 layers. By @thefirstjackal

And this last chain with 29 layers, yet again. @memermemedout

You start at the bottom, barely able to defeat basic enemies, let alone the boss. So you try again and again, slowly learning what works and what doesn’t. Eventually, you beat the first boss/clear the first area/whatever.

And then you do that over again with the second. And the third. And the fourth. Slowly getting better. Slowly getting a better grasp of the mechanics, until you finally get through the whole thing.

It’s that fantasy of going from nothing to the top that probably enamors most people. That being said, the more one knows about how a game works, the more they’ll optimize the fun out of something.