On not admitting to being intimidated.

We are, I should think, about a year away from Elly's trying to argue her way out of a traffic citation. The reason that I mention this is that we're dealing with a sequence in which Elly loses by being intimidated. We start off with Elly being made too self-conscious by John's sports car to function normally because the speed and advertising-created danger of the thing intimidate someone who thinks that her station wagon affords her more safety. Since she's too damned nervous to function correctly, she winds up making a fool of herself fighting a traffic ticket. The reason that I mention this is that most of Elly's 'thing' about machines stems from them scaring her on one level or another.

This seems to be a problem endemic to her generation, I should think. A lot of the fear of technological change seems to me to stem from a fear of screwing up and breaking things and losing face. People these days really tend to underestimate the role of 'face' in human events and it ends up costing them. The one it usually ends up costing is, of course, April because she doesn't understand how terrified her mother is of all of the gizmos she takes for granted because Elly would sooner eat a bucket of live scorpions than admit to being afraid of something. This is odd because you'd think April would have connected that with all of the times Elly never admitted to having misjudged someone to her detriment. Elly doesn't want to admit to having misjudged Kortney because it would make her look bad.