Foobonia and Points West.

As you know, one of the most common and annoying sights in the strip is a character making that irritating, palms-down pleading gesture that looks so fake and stupid and silly, it hurts to look at. The reason for this is that the submissive, pleading stance makes no sense in the situations that Elly has to contend with. Given that Elly has never been threatened with physical harm and should not expect to be, the body language appropriate to a person desperately pleading with an aggressor to not deliver as bad an expected beating as he or she could makes no sense.

The problem is that it doesn't actually have to make sense. Remember when Elly expected John to explode with rage and beat her half to death over a dented fender? Remember how confused John was by her expectation that he become a punitive brute? What we know that he doesn't is that the narcissistic idiot he married has a fixation on being punished for made-up sins. The same self-hatred that makes her look in the mirror and see an unsightly tub of lard makes her think that people are trying to smack her around for making good-faith mistakes. She isn't aware of this and thus would angrily deny that the frightened child in her is making her block a blow to her vital organs but she's aware of so little about herself, it fits that she doesn't know why she slouches.

While it is true that there does seem to be something organically wrong with Elly's brain that makes her see herself as hideous and fat when all that's really wrong with her is that she slouches forward as if the weight of the world is on her shoulders, it does seem that she almost needs the excuse of being fat in order to avoid having to face certain things. As by way of example, she's too damned self-conscious to even dare to try to buy herself something flattering and eye-catching. I mean, even if she weren't raised to believe that decent, respectable people didn't dress in the ultra-dowdy fashion she does, it's as I said before: her natural inclination is to seek out clothing that makes her uglier and less attractive than she actually is in order to repel the male attention that scares her. She might blame hot girls for using the body and language she avoided having for her lonely nights and tear-stained teenaged pillows but her fear of intimacy and vulnerability and failure kept her from trying.

This would be bad enough were it not for the fact that women seem to be socialized against being truly confident about who and what they are. Like any number of women out there, Elly fell into the trap of putting all of her trust in external validation. Only if the crowd agreed that she was beautiful and good and worthy of affection and so on and so forth could she allow herself to believe that she actually deserved the good things in life because she was raised to believe that her self-judgment was biased and flawed and thus had to be rejected. Since a neurological defect that causes her to see a fun-house mirror version of herself marches in lockstep with a culture that makes a bad problem worse and a need to trust said culture that hates her because she was raised to not think too much of herself, she literally can't allow herself to believe people who tell her that she's attractive. Society and her own blinkered mind's eye say she's ugly so John is either trying to trick her, get something from her or his eyes want testing. Anything would be preferable to admitting that letting a mob do your thinking for you is for saps and that the real problem is that your brain needs a firmware patch.

As we all know, Stupid As A Rock Elly's reason for not wanting to have anything to do with Annie after the mess with Steve is that she thought that Annie let her rat husband take her dignity away because she didn't divorce the skirt-chasing idiot like television said to. The countervailing image of the power-mad wife cackling with glee because she finally has a bludgeon to wield over a sucker husband never appealed to our hero for a reason that isn't a default belief that a weak little wifey should never pose a threat to a big strong man. (Note that I didn't say could. This is important.) The reason that this made a lot of sense to Elly is that aside from her 'letting her children run hog wild' (or, as we say in English, not being a crazy person screaming in rage about every little thing), there was another reason that she thought Annie's IQ is PU.

The reason that I have in mind is that Elly stopped having faith in Annie's common sense when it became obvious that unlike fellow whack-job Connie who fed into a delusion that she shared, Annie had the bad taste to tell Elly to her face that no, she wasn't a hideously obese blob and no, it wouldn't be the end of the world even if she were....which she isn't because she's only ten pounds over an 'ideal' weight decided on by a crazy man who thrives on female misery. The indulgent smile and warnings that Elly is making a masochistic fool of herself trusting in the health advice of a TV huckster who feeds into her self-loathing to make a life and living are clearly signs that Annie isn't aware of her surroundings and that her advice can be disregarded. It's only a step from telling a crazy lie about her being almost underweight but afflicted with a psychological disorder that makes her see herself as being fat to letting Steve win. Said step is right the Hell offa the deep end.

As we've just seen, Elly had a fairly pleasant flight to Winnipeg owing to her sitting next to a clergyman with a penchant for groaner-type puns and pseudo-profundity. The problem is that she had an awkward old time when she first met the man because she felt awkward about being in his presence and more awkward still about asserting herself when he'd accidentally inconvenienced her. Upon realizing that his need for some conditioned air had presented a problem for her and she was a bit too wary of criticizing a priest to say anything, he sort of had to do most of the work conversation-wise. My guess is that he assumed that she was raised to not talk out of turn to men of the cloth no matter what; that being said, I think that he underestimated the problem to a large extent owing to his making the natural mistake of assuming that Elly thinks like a civilized adult living in the modern era. He thought "Oh, my. The poor dear was too cowed by who I am to assert herself. I have to make amends" because the reality of her belief that "If I say bad things, the God-man will do a magic on me" would blow his mind. After all, you don't see many people as primitive in their thinking as a Patterson walking around these days so it's easier to assume that heavy parenting is the cause of shrinking violetism in the face of priesthood than fear of having one's soul eaten.

While it is true that Elly seems to have dropped her exercise classes at some point in the middle years, it's not because she developed anything like a healthy self-image. The inability to remember that she's making a big hypocrite of herself by talking about how the only ugly thing on Lizzie's face is the scowl that seemed to have been soldered onto it is something that haunted the woman even unto the end of Patterdays. While we would suggest "stop slumping forward like you're carrying the Stone of Sisyphus" as the sovereign cure for her problems, Elly joins Lynn in not seeing it that way. This is because she seems to be willing herself not to accept the following facts that karisu_sama discussed a while back to be true in the slightest. Just as Mike responds to any claims that Phil wasn't born knowing how to play music as an evil lie meant to trick him into working and working and working and never having fun because adults hate that he can laugh while they cannot, Elly will never accept the following truths as being true:

1. The models she thinks were born beautiful (and thus husband-stealing) are much taller than her own five foot two. This means that they can be the same weight as she is but be more slender in appearance.
2. Models tend to have eating disorders more profound and debilitating than her own and are thus more slender.
3. While she might make a glum, self-denying 'joke' about it, Elly is unwilling to admit that the photos that make her feel bad about herself have been retouched to force a normal human being to look like the impossible ideal.

Her motives for this denial seem to be similar to Michael's. Just as the Delicate Genius doesn't want to admit that he has to practice because that means that he is just another scruffy little idiot instead of the snowflake so special that extra-mean people need to destroy so they don't have to admit how special they aren't, Elly has no long-term interest into admitting that the models that make her feel bad don't look like they do in the photos and probably feel lousier than she does because doing so would mean that she's not only torturing herself for nothing, she's also the willing victim of a hoax.

I think that it's fairly safe to say that when Elly got all wound up about how if Michael disappointed everyone everywhere by selfishly giving up trumpet practice, it would inevitably lead to his sleeping on a steam grate, she lost an opportunity to do something useful and tell him something that he needed to hear. This is because Elly's fear of appearing weak and dread of giving him an angle by which to mess with her has left Michael (and by extension his siblings) with the foolish misapprehension that since John and Elly are adults, they don't have to anything that they don't want to do. As far as he can see, they're free and don't ever have to be pushed around by authority figures who treat them like idiots and chattel and tell them lies about how every day is kid's day. It seems to me that Elly and John would have done far better to tell him that life means having to do stuff you don't want to do but have to. Of course, that would mean having to actually communicate with him as if he were a person in his own right instead of simply an obstruction.

Now that it's the middle of one of the most chaotic winters in recent memory, I'd like to remind you of something that's pretty much a fixture: the teenager who's underdressed for the cold. It doesn't seem to matter if the wind is blowing at thirty miles an hour or if the daytime high is in the low single digits of the Fahrenheit scale, you're going to see some kid running around as if it's a far warmer day. While the first impulse is to mutter about how no sense means no feeling, Lynn does something useful by accident when explaining why it is that children do stuff like that. This is because in a few years, we'll begin the annual tradition of Elly running her mouth about the need to dress warmly only to be confronted by the baffling-to-her problem of children who'd rather freeze than follow her helpful suggestions and not at all badgering and yapping. As history teaches us, Elly has something of an aversion to accepting the fact that she's seen not as a helpful, kindly, loving mother who wants the best for her children but as a malicious, blathering killjoy who only had children so she could have people to torment out of the malice, rage and envy that make up her personality; this is because of her companion aversion to admitting that the point of being a parent in the first place is to produce autonomous individuals who are destined to replace her in the fabric of society when her puerile vanity needs to have them be extensions of her own stupid will. They aren't testing the limits to find out what works and what doesn't like she did, Hell, no. They're doing that because they hate her and want her to suffer. Only on very rare occasions does it sink in that most of the problem she had dealing with her children suffered from the crippling delusion that she was sallow, aged before her time and ten pounds too heavy to be loved.

So far, I've reminded you of certain mental peculiarities Elly has that made it very difficult for her to accept that Mike's plan to wear a goofy little kid's idea of a punk rock costume is a harmless thing that she should have gone along with. I've covered her fear of the unfamiliar, her need to assume the worst, her belief that everyone hates her and wants her to suffer by denying her the chance to contribute to the discussion as well as her being not very smart at all.

The problem is that fear, paranoia, negativity and stupidity aren't the only things that keep Elly from learning anything. Vanity is also part of the problem. Elly simply cannot admit that she doesn't know what she's talking about or that she's letting ignorance and fear make her decisions for her. This is because she believes that were she to have admitted that she reacted badly because she was scared and that she thought Michael didn't love her any more and that she didn't know enough to make any sort of meaningful decision and especially that she needs to feel as if she matters, she will lose the right to be a parent because she willingly lost face. To her, it's better not to budge from a bad decision made out of ignorance and fear so she can preserve her credibility than to give up her power by being right. The fact that she looks less than credible being an unyielding rock of misinformed panic escapes her.

As I mentioned yesterday, Elly is probably thought of not as the caring person she'd like to believe she is but as a dangerously ill-informed housewife making a fool of herself protesting things that she doesn't understand. While it's true that John eventually tells Michael to check his facts before he makes an ass of himself, Elly is never told to do so. Doing so, you see, would require her to ask a question that she dare not ask and will resist having to hear with her last ounce of strength. This horrible, blasphemous question that is sooooooo very terrifying and evil and scary and wrong is as follows and I quote: "What if this event, trend or product that I don't understand that well isn't going to usher in the end of the world?"

I think that the Halloween costume brouhaha can serve as a nice example of Elly assuming that the prosaic and benign is the apocalyptic. This is because she and Annie whine piteously about how the prospect of nuclear war has so enraged and traumatized their innocent children that they've given up on fun and happiness and can now only be scary monsters who reject everything. The only rational response to such whimpering, ignorant, panicky and ludicrous no-think is the question "How long have you two imbeciles been smoking crack cocaine?!" Only a long-term history of exposure to brain-melting chemicals can explain stupidity that profound without resorting to speculation as to whether she and Annie are missing key chromosomes.

The end result of her living in a world of unreasoning, unbelievable and idiotic fear is that she witlessly robs herself of any sort of peace of mind. When she bewailed the fact that her impatience and lack of tolerance made it seem as if her time with her children zipped by before she knew it, Elly lost sight of the fact that her mindless panicking over nothing at all was an even worse thief.

Sadly, this theft is one she and her fans approve of. For reasons that I'll get into tomorrow, the non-event is supposed to be a threat so dire and horrifying that we don't actually need to have it explained to us.

As I have said many times before, Elly tends to stand around gaping in baffled, martyred horror when confronted with the benign, irrelevant, predictable or easily corrected. This is, as I have also said, is because of a default negativity that transfixes and defines her.

This is because when Elly reacts to a non-event as if it were a catastrophe, she's saying "No" to interpreting things as being harmless. She has to see everything that alarms, inconveniences or confuses her as being part of a plot to destroy her not only because of an innate belief that everything will always work out for the worst but because she's a creepy narcissist with a persecution complex.

This is why she's also saying "No" to things not being a big deal. After all, if every little thing didn't mean that the world was actually coming to an end, she'd have to say 'Yes' to being a melodramatic idiot with a need to monopolize the conversation at everyone else's expense and she just can't do that.

What she's also doing is saying "NO!!!!!" to understanding how people really feel and how they see her. In the example I linked to, she goes on her merry way not realizing how horrible Lizzie felt about the whole thing because understanding that would mean saying "Yes" to the idea that her children fear her incessant and baffling rages.

Given that this happens time and again, she's saying "No" to remembering the past. You see, remembering the past might tell her that the world hasn't come to an end yet despite what the children might do. It would also tell her that despite her current belief that the children who she always got along with have suddenly become a problem have always been a problem. Since that would mean that she might be the problem, she wants to live in an eternal present.

She's saying "No" to a realistic understanding of the consequences of her children's actions. After all, if Mike doesn't take his trumpet lessons seriously, he isn't really going to die in a gutter and bring shame on her or any of the horrible things she thinks are certain to happen if he just wants to blow off steam, race around like a goofy kid or try to have a little fun with his trumpet. If the world isn't really going to come to an end, she's a chump who thinks the world has to come to an end because she doesn't have it in her to be happy.

She's even saying "No" to the realization that her children can only make her upset with her own express permission. Time and again, she forgets that the only reason her kids like to push her buttons is that she witlessly gives them what they need: a mother only too willing to destroy her credibility by throwing a tantrum in the name of preserving said credibility.

Since it's next-to-impossible for her to admit that she's a stupid fool who confuses wallowing in dimwit cynicism with being wise to the ways of the world, she's especially saying "NO!!!!!" to any idea that people aren't spending their days trying to hurt or disappoint her because they hate her. They'd have to respect her first and since she says "No" to making herself a force to be reckoned with, all she gets is pity and contempt.