The Neurospicy Bean

I am so angry and I am so tired. I’m tired of walking into spaces I expect to be the most accepting of my existence, only to have it denied with a casual “she” from the most prominent drag queen in the city. Tired of watching my classmates jump to correct the professor when she misgenders a classmate, only to hear myself misgendered and wait for the correction – and wait – and wait – until the discussion has moved on and I have to admit to myself, “you’re just not trans enough for them.” I am tired of being misgendered by a gaming friend and thinking “well, maybe he’s just not good at they/them pronouns,” and then hearing him a second later smoothly referencing a non-binary character, the pronouns rolling off his tongue so fluidly and so in contrast to my own stuttering attempt at correction. I am tired of being praised for wearing men’s shorts, as though this is some huge step in my transition, when it is nothing more than a facet of how I choose to present myself. I am especially

       So once in a while there will be a detail at the beginning of a book that sort of sets me against it and I can just never get over it, and that happened here. Basically the entire premise of the book is that the main character, Jade, has to go stay with her dad in Vietnam in the French colonial house he’s renovating so that he’ll pay for her tuition at UPenn. She explains that she’s lied to her mom that tuition is fully covered when in fact it’s actually still around $30,000 for her freshman year, but she doesn’t want her mom to have to take out loans, and that she has no money for her own tuition because it all went to school application fees.      So, I happen to have some quasi-personal experience with this, because my girlfriend actually goes to UPenn and most of her tuition is covered by financial aid. I actually directly asked her how much financial aid a student coming from a family with three children raised by a single mother who works 72 hours a week at a nail salon mi

       First off, the color palette of this one is absolutely gorgeous. It conveys a really distinctive energy that allows for darkness without things getting too muddy. Some of the panels are really sharp and vibrant, while others are almost dreamlike. Overall just really nice to look at.      As far as story goes, it’s exploring some really interesting dynamics – how should the power to return the dead be used? And how does the privilege experienced by different mutants fit into that? The privilege dynamic was actually the part I found most interesting. One of the several plots in this collection is a storyline about the conflict between some young mutants with Krakoan society. Some young mutants with more visible traits don’t embrace them the way that they’re sometimes expected to in Krakoa, and adults are unreceptive to their requests for help changing their appearance. There are some explicit conversations about how embracing one’s power is much easier when it doesn’t change the p