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(naturally the real punchline of this comic is the sound of Xichen accidentally ripping laundry in the background)

I came up with this concept literally a year and a half ago and I cannot BELIEVE it has taken me so freakin long to draw but HERE IT IS - xiyao hiding from the Wens in the brothel feat. John Mulaney's Horse In The Hospital bit

The next day she came in with my ENTIRE star chart with personality tropes, life advice, predicitons for my future and so on. Now, I don’t go in for Astrology but I can tell when someone is making a well-meaning gesture and I can say “Thank you” and shut up.

Especially because I told her the Wrong Birthday.

See, my birthday is in the middle of a cluster of a whole bunch of family birthdays and growing up I used to have to share my Birthday with my older cousins and while that’s not really a big deal (even fun if you’re older) it kinda sucks when you’re five and none of your cousins share your interests.

So mom made a deal with me: We’d celebrate my “Un-Birthday” in January, when nobody else in the family has a birthday or anything else, and the “real” birthday would be my Cousin’s. I got my own birthday and they got a second party and it was fun.

As I got older, I just started using my Un-Birthday for everything except paperwork, becuase January is boring and bereft of holidays except the one that’s really part of Xmas these days. On paperwork, I put my real one, but I’ve been celebrating my birthday in the wrong month for over 25 years now, and didn’t think about it when she asked, and told her my Un-Birthday.

And for a few weeks everything was fine.

But Debbie had a RIVAL.

Another woman in the office “Sharon” was also big into Astrology and was convinced Debbie was Doing It Wrong, so when she was going over payroll, she saw my Legal Birthday, realized Debbie had filled out the chart wrong, and then proceded to drag Debbie on the company facebook group, and a bunch of astrology groups they were both in.

I found out when I came in three days later from a long weekend and Debbie burst into tears and sobbed “HOW COULD YOU LIE TO MEEEEEE???”

After an extremely garbled recounting by our coworkers, a talk with my manager about “Hey yeah I don’t think it’s Legal for Sharon to take my name and date of birth from Payroll and put it all over facebook?”, the manager had a talk about “I know you are all over 50 but this is NOT WHAT THE COMPANY FACEBOOK IS FOR”, Sharon was ‘removed from the premesis’ and I finally got to sit down with Debbie.

I explained the slip-up and how I sort of have two birthdays and think of the January Birthday is my “Real” one.

Debie looked up from where she’d been sobbing into her tissue all morning, realization dawning on her less like the illumination of the sun and more like a baby sea turtle headed in the wrong direction because of light Pollution.

“Oh!” She said “You’re TRANS-ZODIAC! You might have been born as an Aries, but you’re really a Capricorn!”

As someone who’s been hit by a minivan and gotten a minor skull fracture from it, I’m pretty sure hearing that sentence gave me more brain damage.

Cleaned up & coloured the gamer boy piece!

first act: high schoolers on a magical road trip

second act: disabled veteran returns from war and family doesn’t know how to help him with his PTSD

When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.

Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!

I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well…what is “it?”

I taught this midrash last week to a class of about ten 3rd-8th graders whom I have been teaching since September and have never met in person. I asked them to continue the midrash: if Moses made a second stop in 2021, what would confuse him, and what would reassure him?

The youngest kids had a fantastic time imagining Moses trying to use an iPad, trying to understand that he was in a classroom, that we were doing remotely what he had seen Akiva do in person. The older kids wondered if he would be astonished at our level of literacy, or our coed learning.

When I asked what would reassure him they were momentarily stumped: it wasn’t the first time this group has struggled to identify positives about their lives and experiences, except in a guilty “some people have it worse” kind of way. I reminded them of what reassured Moses in the schoolhouse of Akiva: knowing that what he taught had evolved from rather than superseded the traditions of our ancestors. “Who are we learning about right this very minute?” I prompted.

I shouldn't see other queer people posting takes almost word for word 'if you don't go down on your partner then they'll leave you and it will be your fault' or 'you have to do something you're not comfortable with to pleasure someone.'

if your attitude towards these people is 'well that's stupid they're selfish', then sex with that person isn't something you should do. if you need a certain type of interaction during sex that your partner isn't comfortable giving you, or something you can't compromise, then don't have sex with that person.

the response to 'i don't want to do this, I'm not comfortable, it's just not something i like or can handle' shouldn't be 'youre selfish' or 'if you weren't a bad person, you would do this', and if it is, you shouldn't be having sex with anyone.