The Housening Re-engineered for your protection.

[dreadedcandiru2]

As I said yesterday, I sometimes come away with the impression that Elly Patterson has a lot in common with "Absolutely Fabulous"'s Edina Stone. While it's true that French and Saunders actually set out to create a total incompetent jackass who boasts about how men and children are optional while actually being pathetically unaware that she's hopelessly dependent on the daughter she and her horror monster mutant abomination friend Con....Patsy despise and husbands they mock to keep from starving to death while Lynn did not, the parallels are obvious. The only way that the strip makes any sense is if it's the ravings of an oblivious twit who can't survive on her own and doesn't have the blindest idea of what's going on around her.

This presents a problem for the poor bastard who probably had to sink most of his income in the first years of their marriage settling her debts. After all, John might be carrying the weight for her but he ain't immmortal. Unlike the idiot woman who weeps like a child with a skinned knee because her scary bad husband wants to be bad and scare her with talk about death, debilitation and dismemberment, he fears for her future after he dies.

It thus very well could be that at about the same time he'd noticed that Elly was too busy enjoying having Kortney blow sweet, sweet smoke up her arse to notice or care that the child was a malingering fraud who only pretended she respected Elly, he'd realized that she was pretty much the same moronic idiot who didn't know how things worked and reacted to common sense by ranting like an imbecile about how unfair it is that half of the people in the world will always be below average. His response to that alarming revelation was to sit Mike and Liz down and explain that Mommy was always going to need someone to take care of her and was too combative and stupid to be a good fit for any environment that was more structured than a game of contract bridge. Therefore, they'd have to arrange their lives so that the mother they all knew to be a belligerent dunderhead who doesn't learn things can sail through her remaining years blissfully unaware that she's been made into a client of the able-bodied.

It thus seems to me that Mike's contribution to the plan was to buy the Pattermanse and telecommute to Portrait secure in the knowledge that Elly would never know the difference. Elly and Connie would go on thinking that he'd left the evil, scary city and its evil, scary ways behind him so that he could be the Great Big Author she could have been owing to their never actually reading the magazine (because it has simply AWFUL women showing TOO MUCH SKIN), never actually going to the city (not because they're racists, no, not THEM, they just feel uncomfortable around the unfamiliar) and never actually using the devil computers that would tell them different. Also, Elly would be able to pretend that she's making up for lost time by ignoring a new generation of children and witlessly pitting them against one another.

The downside is that April had to be kept out of the loop because of her inconvenient lack of experience. She might know that Elly doesn't listen to her but she doesn't know that Elly can't live on her own and thus might doom her mother with kindness and honesty. After all, Elly isn't good at realizing what she sucks at and would object to knowingly being under the protection of the competent.

Comments

[josephusrex.livejournal.com]

I'd not care to partner Elly over the bridge table. Do you think for an instant that she'd remember (or even bother to learn in the first place) the language of bidding? If, for example, she opened "three spades," she might be telling you that she had only three of them but they were really really good ones. And any chance she'd ever be able to remember how many trumps are still out? Fuhgeddaboudit. And if anyone ever took umbrage at her passive-aggressive incompetence, she'd whine about how this was supposed to be FUN, and why are you being so MEAN?

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

Heh. I did overreach, didn't I? I wouldn't trust Elly to play jacks without either whining about being picked on or screeching in rage about how people are trying to make a big fool out of her. It's like she's Rob Ford after a sex change and the removal of an entire human being.

[(Anonymous)]

The whole Housening thing was poorly handled. Disregarding the fact that John unambiguously cares more about his trains than his daughter, why was the "tiny train house" the only option?

Assuming that Mike and Deanna HAD to stay in Milsborough, I don't really know how the size of Milsborough or its layout, but there must be dozens of other apartment buildings and houses that they could've picked that would've suited their family fine. What idiot decided that the Tiny Train House or the Pattermanse were the absolute ONLY options?

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

The idiot who decided that Mike's family HAD only the one choice is, of course, Mike. Unlike the Pattermanse, none of the apartments that Deanna had him look at were barn-like and run down enough to fulfill his need to force his family to live in squalor. As for the idiot who decided on the TTH, it was the only one John knew of that would allow him to build his ego-gratifying, youngest daughter-screwing over vandal magnet eyesore model train layout.

[(Anonymous)]

I would argue that it wasn't Mike, but Deanna behind it. Deanna, is of course manipulative and was angling for the Pattermanse the whole time (why she wanted that specific house is not entirely clear): she chose the alternates to make the Pattermanse the only viable option. Mike, being the doormat and gullible fool that he was, went along with it and was probably motivated by nostalgia. Getting Elly and John on board was also a cinch, and that left April to be thrown under the bus. The tiny train house was what John wanted all along, thrown in as a faux offer to Mike and Dee, so he was already on board with the idea. Elly probably had some fantasy of "another generation raising a family in this home" or some other piece of bull, and Deanna knew exactly how both of them worked (they don't have terribly complicated minds).

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

The annoying and bizarre thing about all of this is WHY she wanted the Pattermanse in the first place. She sees inhabiting Elly's house as proof that Elly's inept, only-notice-children-when-they-bother-you parenting is superior to Mira's evil paying attention, talking rationally and being consistent as regards discipline. It's like Lynn reversed polarity on the sitcom cliche of the kid discovering that the free range child she envies has a wretched home life. Here, Elly's rotten parenting is held up as being better than Mira's competence.