In which this title has been suspended due to a lapse in government funding

                            

At this point there isn't a single news source that hasn't released a question/answer or FAQ page regarding the government shutdown. I am no longer sure who they are answering questions for, since shutdown articles are now so populous on the internet they threaten to overtake cat videos and CSI: Miami sunglasses memes combined. 

While these efforts to educate the American public are notable, the time for vague and politically correct answers has passed, so without further ado – 15 questions and answers regarding the government shutdown that might [UPDATE: 8:30pm -  will probably] happen for people who have been living under a rock or watching the week-long Breaking Bad marathon:

1. What causes a shutdown? Senator Ted Cruz

2. What’s a continuing resolution? It means Congress couldn’t get their act together long enough to pass a budget, but they didn’t want the American people to know so they threw some money at the problem.

3. Why can’t Congress agree? See number 1

4.  Will I still get my mail? You still get paper mail? I bet you are reading this on AOL aren’t you . . . yup, thought so.

5. Can I get a passport? What? Why do you need to know this right now? Seriously, if you are undertaking travel that needs a passport in the next few weeks, that is on you. A lack of planning on your part, does not constitute an emergency on my part . . . unless you are Congress, then I guess it does. The lesson here is that you should have planned ahead, Ted Cruz can happen to anyone at anytime.

6. Can I visit national parks? Oh so now you want to visit a national park. The park service has undergone an expensive campaign to get people interested in parks again and it turns out all they needed were a bunch of people sitting at home with nothing to do – noted.  But to answer your question – no, like that song about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot “you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.”

7. What about campers already in parks? Squatter’s rights? But if you really want to know you have until midnight to set up camp in a park and see for yourself. Make sure you tweet CNN about it, they are going to need shutdown reaction tweets. 

8. Will the national archives or the Smithsonian museums be closed? Yes. A good rule of thumb is, if an eighth grader has been grudgingly dragged there on a class trip, it is closed starting midnight tonight.

9. Would food safety inspections continue? Mostly, but I am sure Monsanto will find a loophole.

10. Will e-Verify be affected? Yes, it will be shut down. So if you are an undocumented worker, tomorrow might be a good time to go job hunting.

11. Would a shutdown put the brakes on implementing the Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare?” In perhaps the strangest twist in this whole debacle, the answer is no. The marketplace is funded from separate sources, so the source of all the fuss is exempt from all the fuss . . . and if that doesn’t epitomize the current political atmosphere I don’t know what does.

12. Would the IRS continue to collect taxes? Yes, nice try though.

13. I’m being audited by the IRS. Would a shutdown affect me? Yes, the IRS is suspending audit activities. If you have off work tomorrow, it might be a good time to burn and/or forge any documents necessary before the IRS knocks on your door in a few weeks time.

14. Is this system really the best thing our Founding Fathers could come up with? In their defense, they were drunk and/or womanizing a lot of the time.

And of course, 15. How many news sites will find it necessary to place a countdown timer in the lower left hand corner of the screen? What you have to understand is that a few years ago every major news source made a deal with the devil; he would create twitter so they get instant reaction quotes without leaving the office, but they had to meet a certain quota of unnecessary sound effects, countdown timers, and banners reading "BREAKING NEWS" every month regardless of whether said things were called for in the news cycle. Today is the last day of September, so they have to squeeze in a lot in a short amount of time.

     So that is it folks, stay safe and try not to get arrested in any national parks (but if you do, remember that this blog does not constitute legal advice and any consequences of actions taken by the reader are not the responsibility of this blog, this writer, or our Founding Fathers - it is probably Ted Cruz's fault though). 

In which a mouse is given a cookie and a politician is given a cellphone connected to Twitter

The other day I was walking through a bookstore (I know, what is this – the 90s?) when I spotted a stand filled with one of my favorite children’s books: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. There are so many reasons this book is among my favorites: it is wonderfully written, adorably animated, and underlines the crucial lesson that you should never offer wildlife food or allow them into your home for an extended period of time. Flipping through this book in the store, however, I became acutely aware of how much of the advice within speaks to life and politics in our nation’s capital. Looking back, it is practically a starter’s guide for young political minds; and while the advice is in the guise of an adorable mouse that ransacks a child’s otherwise peaceful afternoon with his increasingly unreasonable requests, the undertones are pure D.C.

LESSON 1: If ____, then ____ and the futility of Why.

When I venture out of D.C. for the occasional vacation or city cleanse, I am bombarded with the same question regarding every political scandal to hit the news cycle: Why? Why would he . . . Why did she . . . Why would they . . . It is always the same inquiry.

To successfully live and thrive in this unique political environment, the first lesson is to stop asking why – it would eventually drive you insane. In the same way that if you give a mouse a cookie, he is going to want some milk – If you give a politician a cellphone that takes pictures and a phone directory, he is going to send a picture of his junk to an intern (best case scenario) or his twitter account (worst case scenario). In the same way, if you tell CNN the first half of a sentence, they will run to publish it without hearing the second half of the sentence. Or if you give Dick Cheney a gun and a hunting buddy . . . well you know how that ends.

LESSON 2: All things start where they began.

After the mouse has ransacked your house, wasted your entire day, and drained your bank account with his various shenanigans, the book tells us he will make one more simple request – he will ask for a cookie. In that way it all comes full circle; like the song that never ends, you will forever be caught in the black hole that is this mouse’s incessant needs and demands. Such is life in D.C. and the convoluted political process our founding fathers envisioned.

In D.C., today’s immigration fight is tomorrow’s . . . immigration fight. We are constantly wrestling over the same set of issues, constantly tugging at the proverbial rope as it moves slightly left or right over time. This is the government our founding fathers envisioned: one of careful checks and balances, one that moves so infuriatingly slow that only the most devoted stick out the arduous process of getting anything done, one that requires so much compromise that even when your side wins, it turns out you didn’t really get anything you wanted. Eventually, some people will decide to get off this crazy political carousel and move into normal, productive lives. Others will fall in love with the insanity of this political atmosphere and forever ride around in circles, sometimes changing which animal they are seated upon.

The important thing is to realize that if you get on the carousel with the right intentions and move that rope even slightly towards justice, you have already accomplished the impossible. In the meantime, remember to enjoy the ride – we are living in incredible times.

And, of course, LESSON 3 - never feed D.C. wildlife – we have some vicious squirrels in these parts.

In which iPods serve as a window to the metro-commuters soul

I have over 3,000 songs on my iPod and I would estimate that less than 500 of them are accompanied by cover art. This leads to the following image being broadcast while I am listening to the majority of my music:

 

A friend noticed this recently and suggested that I allow iTunes to do a cover art match, filling in that glaring blank white space with something snazzy, like this:

The biggest issue with that would be that the majority of my cover art would look something like this:

As much as I want everyone standing around me in a crowded metro to know that I am rocking out to a version of that nonsense Hamster Dance song I pulled off of YouTube or Feliz Navidad in July, I think I can do without broadcasting that information to the entire D.C. metro area. Worse is when I am listening to a song that would be perfectly respectable, were it not for the fact that I am listening to the Glee version. Especially when I own the actual/respectable version on the same phone, just a few clicks away, but have voluntarily chosen to partake in a chorus of 20-to-30-year-olds parading as high school students singing what was otherwise a classic. The other issue lies not in my song choice, but in my need to listen to only one song on repeat some mornings; while the casual iPod eavesdropper might think my listening to Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads is cool, that observation might change to suspicion and then to horror after I hit repeat for the 13^th time.

While this is a problem that plagues music listeners the world over, I feel that D.C. has a special issue as many metro commuters are heading to jobs that will affect the trajectory of this nation, if not the world. The only thing worse than seeing a guy visibly upset and listening to an entire Taylor Swift album during his morning commute, is seeing that guy get off the metro at the Pentagon – we can only hope he doesn’t have access to the nuclear weapon launch codes.

I have become convinced that this is the reason that jobs requiring top-secret security clearance force their employees to have a cover on their personal devices that blocks anyone but the person directly in front of the screen from being able to read it. No one needs to know that someone is listening to Party in the U.S.A. while they head into a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or that Speaker Boehner has been listening to Everybody Hurts by R.E.M. on a non-stop loop for the last few months. (Note: I was going to make a joke here about Joe Biden’s iPod, but I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what must be in his morning playlist . . . )

Now I am not a technology genius, but it seems pretty clear to me that every iPod and cellphone that plays music should come standard with a feature that covers your embarrassing-yet-satisfying musical choices with more respectable pictures. Imagine if on your commute you could rest safe in the knowledge that while you rocked out to Ke$ha, the person next to you thought you were listening to a Paul Krugman audio book; or the appearance that you were listening to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, while you were playing the theme song from DuckTales on a loop, because that is the kind of morning you are having.

Until that time comes, keep rocking out D.C.-metro commuters; I will keep your iPod secrets, if you keep mine.

In which Ruthie B. is remembered

My guinea pig, Ruthie B., passed away last night.

Ruthie was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her favorite activities were eating bananas, licking the salt off people's hands, and hiding under things.

Her lifelong ambition was to be a capybara; while this was never realized she was awarded the Guinea Pig Medal for Resilience in 2011 for surviving a car ride from Bloomington, Indiana to Washington, D.C. She is also being awarded the Guinea Pig Medal for Patience posthumously for allowing her owner to clip her nails on numerous occasions without biting her once, an honor her sister cannot claim.

She was a small pig in a big world, but she was very loved and will be missed.

In which observations are made in the tourist city

I have lived in D.C. for two years now and am still completely baffled by how all of the tourists know the official day when “tourist season” starts, yet D.C. residents seem to be caught completely off guard every year. It is as if, as a city, we collectively hope that come warm weather, all of our national monuments will grow legs and move somewhere where they are some other city's problem. Part of the shock is there is not a slow spring trickle of tourists that grows into the regular summer onslaught, they just all show up at once. One day every red double-decker tour bus that passes is empty and the next day it is full. Boom! You’re in tourist season: do not pass Go, do not collect $200. (Also, when it rains, all of the tourists put on those plastic ponchos – why is that a thing tourists? Why?)

For all of the crowds and frustrations that it brings, I am actually a fan of tourist season. More accurately, I am a fan of the beginning of tourist season.; that bright-eyed month or two where a person can view the city anew through the wondered gaze of people viewing their nation’s capital for the first time. Case in point, the other day I was walking to work when a family of tourists stopped cold in front of me and started to take pictures of a large glass-faced office building. I looked up to see what they were photographing and noticed, FOR THE FIRST TIME, that the building has this incredible three-dimensional glass front, like some of the windows stick out further than others creating this cool visual effect. Could I have looked up on any other day and seen that – sure; but I didn’t, because I just never thought to look in the normal course of my day. (Also because most of the sidewalks in D.C. are so poorly maintained that looking up at a building could probably result in a serious trip and fall situation. And don’t think you can sue the city for that, because you would be suing the federal government and we all know they are dead broke. The feds are so broke right now, if you opened the White House game closet, even the Monopoly money would be gone.)

But that is what the beginning of tourist season brings, the ability to view this incredible city anew. To actually feel a little excited when the motorcade goes by, instead of worrying that you are going to lose your OpenTable points when you are late for your dinner reservation (a legitimate concern, no doubt). To get swept up in the excitement of the moment when a tour group thinks they see John McCain (pro tip: it is not McCain, he is too short to be viewed in a crowd of people). To realize you are living in a city that people travel to see, instead of a city people travel away from. That is what tourist season brings.

That dream moment that is the beginning of tourist season always ends the same way, however, and that is in a screaming fight between residents and a large tourist family as they stand on the left side of an escalator during rush hour. Or in watching a child get separated from his family when they fail to realize that the metro doors do not have motion sensors and will legit close on you, regardless of your gender, age, or financial status (I seriously saw metro doors close on a pregant woman once. I am serious, metro is cold). Or when you show up to your favorite restaurant and there is a wait because it is filled with, literally, 10 million 8th graders wearing the same splatter-painted “I love D.C.” sweatshirt. Those are the moments when the dream that was the beginning of tourist season is truly dead.

But for now we are still on the cusp of that beautiful moment of city renewal. The time to discover the nation’s capital through the eyes of every eager tourist and every slacker 8th grader who can’t figure out why the class couldn’t have taken their graduation trip to DisneyWorld. For now we can all just enjoy. 

A happy tourist season to all and to all a good night!

In which I am visited by three grasshoppers

I recently read that green grasshoppers are considered symbols for good luck and new beginnings. Green grasshoppers are actually just young grasshoppers, thus the new beginning symbolism. In addition, grasshoppers can only jump forwards and not sideways; the apparent meaning behind this particular factoid is supposed to be that I am about to bound forward in my life, or I should start thinking about bounding forward, or I am about to get evicted and will face no alternative but to bound forward.

I know all of this because I had the pleasure of being visited by three of the little creatures over the past few weeks and took to looking it up. It was either a message from the universe about my future or a sign that I was facing a rather serious bug infestation. Choosing the former, I turned to the ever-trustworthy internet to foretell the meaning of my little green messengers.

The symbolism of the “new beginning” grasshopper struck home pretty quickly as I am living in a sublet apartment without any furniture and working a temporary job. So thank you for stating the obvious universe. If I wanted a late evening “you should think about getting a job at some point soon” I would have called my parents.

On the other hand, the grasshopper is also a symbol for moving forward, getting the incentive to leap into the future and let go of the past. My hesitation in embracing that meaning is that in my experience, grasshoppers often jump in the way of lawnmowers or cats, in which case: thank you, but no thank you universe.

So I created a list of potential messages I can derive from my omen. Until I get clearer guidance from the universe on what exactly is expected of me I will have to act on all of them. They are as follows:

1. I am about to receive an offer leading to a great opportunity

2. I should work harder to create a great opportunity for myself

3. I should be ready to accept an opportunity that is already waiting for me

4. I need to let go of the past so I can more fully embrace the world of opportunities in front of me

5. Stay out of the way of cats and lawnmowers