Watterson titled his speech 'Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled.' He told the graduates that after being fired from his first job as an editorial cartoonist, he spent five years getting nothing but rejection letters while working a job he hated — designing ads in a windowless convenience store basement where colleagues' greatest concern was gaming the time clock. The experience taught him that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money but in the work itself, and that enduring five years of rejection required either delusion or love. He had love.