dreadedcandiru2 | No pain, no brain......

You'll have noticed that when Mike got so overwhelmed by how good Winston Marsalis was, he decided that he simply had to quit in despair, he spent all of his time wailing futilely about the pain and misery of it all. In his mind, he was expected to simply suffer without any hope of relief so that his sadistic mother and cruel uncle could enjoy watching him be miserable. This, I think, seems to come from a self-defeating belief that hampers him from really enjoying life like he wants to. Not only are people trying to humiliate him because they like watching him suffer, they also want to call him lazy and stupid and selfish and worthless by asking more of him than he can ever hope to accomplish because he can't imagine himself getting good at anything that causes him discomfort. Deep down, you see, Mike doesn't like who he is and doesn't think that he can do anything; this translates into a default defeatism that his him whine about how awful it is that people expect him to have enough pride in himself to at least try.

He's not alone in this, of course. It seems that April is the only Patterson immune from wailing "I can't DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO this/I HAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE this!!" the minute it stops being enjoyably easy. Given how dim and immature the rest of them are, it doesn't take a keen mind to realize that when a Patterson bleats about how awful it is that he or she isn't allowed to be happily mediocre, he or she assumes that the people who don't understand how little the Foob likes him- or herself are monsters who want to torment them instead of well-meaning sorts who don't relate well to defeatism.