Burner Resume: Kira, Chaos Princess

Burner Handle: Kira, Chaos Princess (FKA Cheesepants) (she/they)

Defaultia Region of Origin: Atlanta

Years Burning/home burn: 12 / To The Moon in Tennessee

NSFW: I’m a polyamorous disaster-bi switch, I’m always NSFW.

Years of Servitude, ahem, volunteering: 11, 7 in leadership

Lead Role: Currently Rangers, have also served as an event lead, first aid lead, placement co-lead, volunteer coordinator, and perimeter lead. But Rangers and Perimeter are my first loves.

Why? I’m not particularly artistic or self-expressive (at least not in burn-adjacent ways) but I’m protective AF and deal with crises well. Burn safety is a passion for me, especially after seeing people get hurt early on in my burn career. #WeKeepUsSafe

Why does your dept matter?
Rangers help the community help themselves. We provide conflict mediation and de-escalation in a non-authoritarian method, holding space and providing tools for community members to solve their own problems and conflicts. When it comes to situations that community members can’t solve on their own, we have the training and resources to hold the “burn bubble” and manage the emergency so the community can thrive.

Why does volunteering improve your burn/make you happy/work for you?
There is nothing more satisfying than handling difficult situations so smoothly that most of the burn doesn’t even notice anything happened, and holding space for the community to thrive.

Why should someone consider volunteering for you?
No one should consider volunteering for me. They should volunteer for the community, not for an individual; we volunteer together. Rangers check their egos at the door; whoever you are when you’re off shift, when your Ranger shirt goes on, you’re there to serve. That goes for the Ranger lead even more than it does for any other Ranger. If you want to donate a few hours of your time to civic responsibility, we would love to serve with you, but Rangering isn’t for everyone and that’s ok!

What's your favorite volunteer story?
My first burn as Ranger leadership was Alchemy 2015, infamously known as Alchemuddy, when the remains of a tropical storm came overhead on day 1 and stalled over the area, turning our entire site into a quagmire of mud and despair. It was, at the time, the most grueling five days of my life. The first night of the storm, half the burn’s infrastructure was destroyed and cars were stuck in our access roads and we literally had no medevac option other than Life Flight and people had no dry clothes because so many tents had catastrophic rain fly failures. It was fucking miserable.

That morning, we had an all-hands leadership meeting at sunrise and listed everything we needed to get done to be functional and safe as a community. Pulling stuck cars off of access roads so we could get emergency vehicle access back. Getting contractors in to spread wood chips or gravel or whatever. We had board members running to Walmart and buying out every pair of socks and rainboots in stock. Getting infrastructure fixed. We needed a lot of extra volunteer help and we needed it bad, but we also knew people needed to unfuck their camps, and half our scheduled volunteers didn’t get in the previous night before we had to close the gate for safety reasons (and we couldn’t reopen gate until we unfucked things inside.)

So Rangers were tasked, along with a few other teams, with going around the entire burn and convincing people to go to the volunteer coordinator pop-up and sign up to help with everything that needed doing. --- y’all, it took no convincing at all. The Ranger carts were thoroughly entombed in mud, so I grabbed a megaphone and went walking through the main camping area of the burn, calling for people to come help if they could. And I almost got stampeded by all the people running past me to go volunteer as soon as they found out we needed their help. People sitting in their destroyed camps, in drenched and mud-covered clothes, some of which hadn’t slept all night because the conditions were so bad, and they dropped everything and RAN for the volunteer coordinator HQ. And it was like that all weekend. People constantly coming up to me and other people on carts, asking how they could help.

People helping each other. It was absolutely fucking beautiful. It was the purest manifestation of civic responsibility and communal effort imaginable. --- The sun didn’t come back out until Monday, as I was packing up Ranger HQ. And pretty much everyone still on site cried. It was a brutal, miserable weekend. But it was beautiful. Still my favorite burn. We couldn’t control the terribad conditions, but we responded to them and pulled through it together.

What's your choice nugget of wisdom for a virgin?
Don’t eat ass on Sunday.

What's your best burner skill?
I know six different ways to hotwire a golf cart.

What's your drink of choice?
Anything with high caffeine content. Or a nice dark beer. Porters and stouts make me happy when I’m not on-comm Rangering.

What keeps you sane in Defaultia?
Bold of you to assume I’m sane in defaultia.

Why do you love burning?
It’s a bubble where we get to build a community temporarily and do magical things together.

Has burning changed your life? How?
I’m more confident in my skills and experience, in my capacity to accomplish things as part of a team. I’m a better communicator. The first space I really felt comfortable to be openly queer was a burn, and it was part of giving me the courage to come out as bisexual in the rest of my life. It’s also made me a better activist; I serve as a street medic at protests and actions and the emergency management skills and experience I’ve gained from burn leadership has made me able to help people I might not have otherwise been able to help.

What does consent mean to you?
I have my autonomy. You have yours. I have the right to exercise my autonomy up to the point where it impacts yours. Anything beyond that requires consent.

Which principle is primary for you and why?
Communal effort/civic responsibility. There is nothing more satisfying than collaborating with an amazing group of people to accomplish things you could never accomplish on your own.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise.

What's your snack of choice?
My answer is NSFW. Shrug.

What groceries do you bring to a burn?
LOL. There’s a betting pool in the southeast on how long it will be before I get scurvy at a burn. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cracker snack packs, and lots of caffeinated pop. I never have time to cook.

What are your top decomp tips?
Always have a clean, dry change of clothes, including shoes, in your car for the trip home. If your tent fails and everything you own gets soaked, this one will save your ass.

How has burning changed Defaultia for you?
I get the occasional ticket because of trying to drive my car the way I drive a golf cart. Don’t judge me.

If you could go to a burn anywhere in the world, which one would you attend and why?
The one I’m at right now. A burn isn’t the location, it’s the people.