On getting away from it all.

As we all know, we're about three months away from the failed camping trip that Lynn uses as a sort of arbitrary boundary separating the Early and Middle Years of the strip. What I find interesting about this is the reason John and Phil give for charging up to the woods: a need to get away from it all; the reason that this interests me is that it's sort of obvious that Elly isn't allowed to enjoy vacations with the family because the "it" John wants to get away from follows her. Said "it", is of course, doing housework, cooking and tending to the Ungrateful Wretch and Grand Waste Of Time while he sits on his ass and comments about how nobody has to work on vacations.

This, of course, leads us to another "it" Elly doesn't seem to have ever gotten away from: the seeming lack of gratitude of her family and their apparent lack of awareness not only of how hard she has to work but that she would like to know that it leads somewhere that isn't her nightmare of Mike writing her eulogy and wondering why he didn't do anything nice like this for her while she was alive to enjoy it. John seems to have gone on record as assuming that since he was never around to hear his mother complain, Elly's feelings that she's losing her mind is simply the hormones doing the talking. By the time it started to sink in that maybe she never did like to do housework, Lynn had recast her as a super-competent super-everything so the whole point was moot.