On camping trips and funerals.

As we know, Lynn used the messed-up camping trip John and Phil went on as a boundary separating the Early and Middle Years of her strip owing to the fact that shortly afterward, Lizzie started attending elementary school. Personally, I think that John and Elly probably justify using September 1986 as a dividing line because they went from a 'young' family just starting out to a more mature family with two children in school and not because a few months earlier, John learned that his brother in law is a walking hazard in the wilds. The reason that I mention this is that this is probably not how Mike and Liz think the dividing line ought to be.

This is because I like to think that when the two of them look back on their childhoods, they refer to things happening either before or after Thelma Baird passed away. It seems to me that when they just happened to start attending school means rather less to them than when it became a reality that they were never going to see this person they knew and liked any longer. It also seems to me that the Elly who wanted Lizzie to stop feeling pain or sorrow because Thelma didn't suffer has no real idea that her children use what she calls a sad miracle as a reference point.

Protesting Lizardbreaths….

Since it’s about eleven years or so since Liz screamed WAIT!!!!!! at a computer because her ‘friend’ Anthony needed a ‘friend’ in his hour of self-inflicted need (as well as being eleven years since she got all defensive about having any sort of role in the break-up of his marriage), it behooves us to remind ourselves that not only does she not want to admit that even if she herself didn’t intend to do anything to mess up Therese’s life, her intentions have the same weight as anyone’s when the shit hits the fan. The phrase I like to use when I want to describe how much her not wanting to be seen as a homewrecker actually means is “sweet dick all” because a person is what she does, not what she wants to do.

It means even less when you consider a second fact she’d prefer not to face: part of her wanted to see Therese die in a cancer fire for ‘stealing’ a friend from her. She doesn’t want to admit to being a jealous pinhead who thinks that the only friend someone has should be her because that makes her a bad person but the thing exists no matter what she tells herself. This means that she doesn’t want to admit that it delights her that this woman crashed and burned because she dared to make her feel bad about being a graceless nitwit who thought that social norms that got in her way should be abolished. She mouths pious gibberish about her being a casualty of horrible parenting but the honest fact is that we’re dealing with an immature twerp who doesn’t want to admit that she has negative impulses.