Dial M for masochism: Elly the committee member.

To continue on from yesterday, it's rather hard to really sympathize with Elly when she screams about how important her many, many meetings are because they seem to me to be the public equivalent of the mounds of laundry she does every day. This is owing to the fact that just as the great big job at the library she'd invested pretty much most of her identity in turned out to be "glorified intern", it's sort of obvious that the only reason people on committees would miss her is that she's the answer to the question "What pathetic and needy idiot can we dump all of this useless busywork onto?"

The reason I'm confident about that is that Elly reminds me of a lot of people I knew in high school; they just couldn't sit still no matter what and they had a need to be thought well of that was painful to behold. When these flaws marched in lockstep, the sufferer would almost always end up becoming a public service announcement warning people about the dangers of over-extending and over-committing. Given that Elly is pretty much the same moron she was when she was a plastic flower child driving her mother bonkers, the yearning for approval and terror of inactivity still sabotage her. Hell, the present day Elly is still burning herself into the ground being somebody's damned packmule.