Comic for Monday 11/22 (Early High Res) (Patreon)

There was a time when our kids played with the friends we gave them. The children of friends of ours, other family, whoever we decided their playdate was with. The kids are old enough now that they're out in the world making friends on their own, which is great, but it also means I'm being roped into awkward blind dates with other parents in order to facilitate their increased social presence.

Just about all of them are perfectly lovely people, but most often there's very little common ground with any of them beyond the surface-level stuff. In fact, the more of these fellow adults I meet, the less like an adult I feel myself. Oh, you commute to work wearing a tie and want to casually chat about dividends and weekend fishing trips? Excuse me, I'll be over here being the guy who sometimes works in his pajamas, drawing silly pictures on the internet. My plans for the evening are either hunting monsters in a late 1800's bayou, or digital version of a massive fantasy board game I also own a copy of.

It reminds me a little of high school, where sometimes you had to be able to sort of exist in social situations even if you didn't necessarily feel like you belonged.