It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

Calvin, the six-year-old in Watterson's comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, says this with perfect mock dignity, and the joke is that he has turned a flaw into a policy. Denial sounds like weakness, while selectivity sounds like a skill. Yet there is a grain of truth under the humor: nobody takes in all of reality at once, and what we choose to attend to shapes the world we live in. To adults, Hobbes is a stuffed toy, but to Calvin he is a friend. The strip keeps siding with imagination over grown-up dullness, which fits Watterson's wariness of conformity and cynicism.

The line is both a confession and a warning. Choosing what to dwell on can be healthy, but ignoring facts that matter is just Calvin dodging homework, and the consequences arrive anyway, as they usually do for him.

Here is how someone might use it today. A person job-hunting after a layoff accepts the hard facts: the market is tight and savings are finite. But they decline to spend every evening scrolling through gloomy economic news. They put that attention into the next application and a call to a former colleague. That is selective, not in denial.