616: Lease
Lease |
Title text: You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls. |
Explanation
Cueball is about to sign a lease to rent a building, but he's scared that he's not grown-up enough for the responsibility, presenting as evidence that he still plays with Lego building blocks.
In reality, as children, we often think that when we're adults, we'll somehow definitively feel like adults, but this isn't the case. We may become more responsible and capable over time, but we'll never attain the infallibility we erroneously associated with adults when we were children.
Of course, Cueball actually isn't responsible and capable, since he drifts off to think about the fictional character Batman (who appears in comic books, often considered children's material, in the middle of a serious financial transaction.
The title text references one of xkcd's most famous comics, 150: Grownups, where Megan decides to use the freedom of adulthood to fill her apartment with playpen balls.
Transcript
- [A man is holding a sheet of paper.]
- Man: Okay, any other concerns before you sign the lease?
- Cueball: I'm concerned that we're sitting here like I'm a responsible adult. I'm pretty sure I stopped growing up in my teens and have been faking ever since.
- Cueball: For god's sake, you're entrusting me with a building. I still make LEGO buildings sometimes.
- Man: Sir, does any of this impact your fulfillment of the lease terms?
- Cueball: I don't know what you just said because I was thinking about Batman.
Discussion
I'm coming up on a landmark decade, probably somewhere near the half-way mark of my future-projected life expectency, and I can totally relate to that feeling of being a child in an adult world... And did I really just use the word 'totally' in that manner? 178.99.247.73 22:03, 21 May 2013 (UTC)
- Trust me; nothing changes. You just get older on the outside. I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 08:29, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I totally see myself doing that in the future. 162.158.255.40 04:00, 8 June 2016 (UTC) Swaphero
"Fake it till you make it" is truly a real thing. For years I felt like I was only acting at being skilled and knowledgeable at my highly technical job (impostor syndrome). It wasn't till someone asked a question about an obscure detail of one particular component, which I easily answered off-the-cuff, that I realized I actually WAS skilled and knowledgeable - and then realized everyone else had been doing "fake it till you make it" too! 172.70.82.71 00:39, 22 June 2023 (UTC)