The blame evasion conundrum.

The telling part of the idiotic hormone attack story line is Mike's admission that he has not the least idea of what really went on at his birthday party. We saw what was really going on because we saw a stupid idiot in the midst of a panic attack standing next to the snack table shoving his face full of food telling himself that he was going to humiliate himself and being laughed at only to find that Martha got sick of waiting and tried pulling an Operation Jealousy thing to get him to do something that wasn't "stand around like a shivering pillar of shit."

What he saw (and what he probably still sees) is that he told her he liked her and she got bored with him and went off with someone else. The reason that this matters is that Mike has a long history of not actually seeing what Martha is doing or why because of that hang-up of his about being laughed at by boys who, despite his belief otherwise, are not really his friends. This time last year, we were dealing with that idiotic note protocol of his wherein no one was supposed to know about their relationship and how her not seeing that it simply HAD to be a secret from her friends so that his not actually friends wouldn't tease him meant she didn't really like him and she was just stringing him along to see him groaning in pain and misery. This is followed by his idiotic belief that she was supposed to love a Valentine that insulted her because he couldn't be asked to suppress his individuality by acting like someone whose brain ain't just two neurons tied together in a slipknot. Blaming her protects him from having to look in the mirror and see a gutless, spineless, brainless, clueless, heartless and dickless little non-entity who should be fed head-first into a damned wood chipper for being a moron letting a good thing slip through his fingers because he can't admit that everything wrong that happens in his life happens because he's always wrong.

The grey hair, the blank mind......

Since we're about to head into yet another "Elly runs around in circles howling in despair because she's just discovered that she's aged like a zillion years overnight but not really because it's just her not wanting to be reassured because she takes that to mean that people don't take her or her feelings seriously" arc next week, it seems to me that I've allowed myself to drift away from an accurate idea of what's going on.

Beforehand, I'd described Elly as being much like her children. Whenever Mike or Liz are done poisoning the well like idiots, they think that they've taken the blame off the person they've mistreated by declaring that they only thought that they were in love with whoever dodged the Patterbullet but they didn't know what love means until that moment. In Elly's case, it seemed to me that when Elly talks about taking her appearance in stride, she actually meant "Oh, well, I did panic back then but I was wrong to think I looked old and fat but I'm not wrong now."

What really seems to be happening is that each and every time that Elly changes from someone aging gracefully to someone freaking out about looking like an old lady, Lynn's inability to clearly remember what she did last time and reluctance to find out probably mean that it happens for the first time every year. Lynn's poor technique thus means that we have the worst of both worlds in which we repeat old gags AND have the characters age in real-ish time.