The real reason that I'm sort of disappointed that my prediction that we would return to the Evil-because-he-was-able-to-get-away-with-things-Elly-didn't-have-the-courage-to-try-Phil and Clueless-because-she-needs-a-MAAAYYYYYUUUUNNNNN-Connie show is that it's yet more proof that Lynn simply doesn't care about the continuity of the new-ruins. So far, we've seen the following plot points be advanced only to be retracted because they make the straight reprints harder to explain:

• The age and number of the Nichols children was the first change in 'history' to be reconsidered; as we know, Lynn started out with the idea that Christopher was Mike's contemporary and Richard Lizzie's. Since she doesn't want to spend the next few years changing dialogue, she simply 'forgot' that she'd changed the number and age of Annie's kids and set things back to right.
• Her attempt to correct the premature disappearance of Deanna, as I said when it came up, raised a lot more questions that it supposedly answered; we were, after all, asked to accept Lynn's interpretation of how house sales worked without being allowed to point out the absurdities.
• Mike started out taking a bus from kindergarten, which Lynn called preschool, and then started taking the bus for the first time when he got into first grade.
• Elly supposedly already took an extension course only to drop out but now is the first time this has happened.

This is sort of a marvel, in an odd way; anyone can forget details but it takes someone special to be that apathetic about it.

It's hard to believe that it's been three weeks since I put forth the notion that Connie would head off to Montreal to pursue a very reluctant Phil Richards despite it seeming that she'd moved on; it seems longer because we've had to trudge through so much of Elly's self-willed martyrdom that it's hard to have to contemplate Connie's brand of the same sickness. Since we thought that the issue had actually been resolved, its reintroduction raises a lot of issues that don't do the characters involved much credit. Said issues all point back to the obvious question "Why does Connie think that she stands a chance of snagging Phil?" The answers that seem most likely to your humble(!) servant are as follows:

1. Phil, despite Elly telling him to stop being an ass, is deliberately leading Connie on out of sheer hateful maleness; he will most likely be revealed to want to create chaos in order to have an innocent, trusting woman fawn over him.


2. Connie, despite constant reminders from Elly that she's kidding herself, has somehow convinced herself that his polite gestures are less the result of his being raised to be kind to his sister's friends and more an indication that he, despite his statement that he doesn't see her as a love interest, 'really' means that he cares as much for her as she for him.


3. Elly is stirring the pot and feeding Connie inflated estimates of what Phil's real feelings are because she's tired of his having a freedom she lacks; in her mind, it's high time that her shiftless kid brother grew up, got a real job and quit playing bees and bops in bars.


4. Elly is stirring the pot by saying things that confuse and embolden Connie because she's too dim to know that her idiotic remarks create a hope that cannot be fulfilled.

There are, of course, other scenarios that explain why this will happen; what it doesn't do (unless, of course, you chalk things up to poor story-telling and simply accept the oncoming horror) is explain why she had to revisit something that she changed for the better. I had hoped she'd flesh out the story by explaining why Mira was evil wrapped in a kielbasa, not by making Connie even more pathetic when she chases after Phil and Ted. This, of course, is owing to her following the mores of her creator. She is, after all. engaged in this doomed pursuit because she, as a 'good' woman wants to have a man to validate her by marrying her and give her children so she can have a real identity; Phil, as a 'bad' man, simply wants sex without all the emotional baggage Lynn insists that he carry. If Connie were to simply want to have icky, awful sex with the Token that meant that she was Taken, she'd be an earlier version of Evil Therese and thus not worth our sympathies. Since the woman is racing around looking for love in a lot of wrong places while ignoring her own happiness and peace of mind, she's laughable in a sort of seedy, disgusting way. People who sell themselves short like her generally are.

You can't read the strip for as long as I have without noticing something that howtheduck picked up on years ago; he noticed that Lynn believes in a strict segregation between adult and child behavior. In her world, adults should act like adults and children like children. This is, of course, why Elly is in a blind panic about the prospect of being a stay-at-home mother; she clearly seems to have dreaded violating the laws of Foob and Whatever-God-the-Pattersons-believe-in by taking an interest in the things her children do and how they think. The 'proper' role of a parent is to sit back and stare at her children while they do whatever useless, boring, not-at-all-interesting-or-worth-parental-attention things they do; intervention is only permitted if they distract mother's attention from busywork. Lynn likes to contrast good parents like Elly, adult Michael and adult Deanna with a bad parent to show us how we are to live; beforehand, we had Mira as the (designated) cautionary example; as we know, the 'misguided', 'overly-indulgent' woman delighted in trying to undermine Deanna's authority by interacting with Meredith and Robin as if they were worth paying attention to and their concerns worth acknowledging; since someone with an axe to grind is trying to make herself feel better about how she missed out on her children's growing up because of the demands of her career, the result was to turn them into a pair of hellions who spent their days dreaming up new ways to annoy their parents. Now that we're in the new-ruin era, John, who has Mike and Lizzie eat cookies for dinner and who plays with them is, of course, trying to ensure that they become spoiled, demanding and tyrannical to undermine Elly and make work for her. This is so they can join the Nichols children in turning out weong because Annie paid them attention and thought their activities worth her interest.

Since many of us started following the strip in the nineties or so, we labor under the misapprehension that the Pattersons have never given more of their time to a cause than lip service; this is something of a mistake because Lynn appropriated Rod's instinct towards public service and assigned it to the Elly of the late eighties. As we will eventually see, she spent most of her free time either in a meeting or shuttling between them. What Lynn really thought of volunteering is fairly easy to determine by examining the role Elly played; she was a hand sticking leaflets under wiper blades or ringing doorbells, a bottom sitting behind a card table holding a fund-raiser's jug and a voice mouthing slogans or cheering on Mike's hockey team; what she wasn't was a brain deciding goals or formulating policy. That part of her life came about as the result of volunteering, though; I am, of course, discussing the programs she ran at the local library. The odd thing is that giving of herself gave Elly no peace of mind; she and Connie spent their time whining about it taking time away from their families, about how they had no time to themselves and how they missed out on sunsets. This, of course, was the beginning of the end for that as it foreshadowed how Elly would later opine that Lilliput's was stating to own her; slowly but surely, Elly "realized" the family-unfriendly moral Lynn had planned all along; that's because in her view, volunteering is a well-meaning but essentially futile activity that disrupts family life. Having all the programs she worked so hard to maintain be scrapped after she got fired due to budget cuts was simply the final nail in the coffin. Elly could then safely moan that since nothing she did had any lasting impact and since the problems of the world never really went away, the only thing open to her was to post a sign in the bathroom reminding April that they conserved water so don't take too long in the shower.

I'm going to start this entry by making a confession: I'm not really all that fond of Winter. Like a lot of Canadians, I associate it with cold, blustery days and clear, chilly nights, icy roads and sidewalks, snowdrifts, windchill, freezing rain, the possibilty of freezing pipes, slush, bundling up like Nanook of the North and still feeling half-frozen, plow drivers who seem Hell-bent on trying to bury people alive and a lot of other fun things. Where I differ from Elly is that I can take the stress without scrunching up my face or thinking that the sky is mad at me. I mean, it's Winter; nobody really likes it but we've got to be like John and make the best of things instead of standing in the hallway frowning and bellowing at Farley for shaking all over the carpet because we'd rather NOT have him come in the garage and do that, oh no, not US because that would mean that John was right all along. At this point, of course, you'd probably tell yourself that at least when she goes on her kid-free vacations, she can calm down; you'd be dead wrong, though. When she goes down South, she complains about it being sticky hot, how they pretend that they don't understand English no matter HOW LOUD SHE SHOUTS and whinges about catching tropical diseases. It seems, at least to me, that the only place Elly would truly be happy is some vast, featureless, climate-controlled corridor with nothing to distract her attention or stir her baffling, ill-focused discontent.

In an earlier post, I commented on certain facial expressions that Lynn liked to draw; I'd listed the Bug-Eyed Glare of Existential Horror, the Sticky-out Tongued Laugh of Malice and the Unhinged Jaws of Disproportionate Hostility; the neat thing about the new-ruins is that there's a new expression: the Scrunched-up Face of Rage; lately, it seems that we cannot go a week without seeing Elly with her eyes narrowed in anger sporting a severe and possibly evil underbite. The strange thing is the cause; we generally see this happen when the children are enjoying themselves. As howtheduck noted, the Elly of original history simply avoided having fun with the children based on the lunatic theory that her brain would erode and she'd become a babbling infant were she to do so; now, she seems to be actively trying to prevent them from having any fun at all. The reason, I think, is that since she's upset for no reason that she can articulate, the only way she can be less miserable is by spoiling other people's fun. The problem with this is that she ends up hating it when she wins; most of the Middle Years are spent watching Elly wring her hands and ask why it is that Michael sits in front of the box instead of reading or playing or taking an interest in the world. Since she doesn't want to face up to her responsibilities, she'd rather not admit that she was the mad scientist who made that monster.

As we've seen, the reason Elly gives for not wanting to be a stay-at-home mother all her life is her belief that if she cannot hear adult conversation, her brain will certainly atrophy and she will spend her days thinking about childish things; once this devolution to a babbling infant-woman who can only talk about skinned knees, school assignments and similar pointless things is complete, John will have 'won' by making sure that no one will take her seriously. This, of course, is owing to a belief that nothing a child has to say is worth taking too seriously and an over-great preoccupation with same will make her a lesser adult. The same sinister process occurs when she tries to foreshadow Jack Thompson and control what media her children are exposed to; she seems to believe that the motherhood police will bust down her door and take away her license if she allows her children exposure to the fart jokes, gross, messy stuff, horseplay and other macho stuff she was raised to believe was silly, disgusting and wrong. Since she doesn't have the will or brains to question Marian's teachings or the ability to learn from experience, she's in for a life of screaming over not much. As for the obvious solution of sitting her arse down and reading with her children, that's a non-starter; like I said, she thinks that if she were to sit down and read Pokey Little Puppy with Mike, her cerebral cortex would melt and she'd be just another yammering infant talking about nothing that matters or needs to be listened to. Also, since she's sort of out of it, she doesn't realize that her children have picked up on the fact that she thinks that they have nothing worth saying.

As we've seen, Elly's imaginative capacity is severely stunted; this is because she's fairly narcissistic and has trouble coping with people who are not exactly like her and with unfailiar situations. Since it's next to impossible for her to empathize with someone else owing to her inability to step inside their minds, she makes the odd assumption that in a given situation, they should want what she would want, know what she knows and do what would make her the happiest; this means that she seems to never have the right answer to the question "What did you expect would happen?" as the following examples will attest:

• The current arc is an example of this; what Elly clearly expected to happen is that the teacher would download the ability to write and the inspiration needed to express herself into her brain like a computer transferring a file. This, as I said yesterday, was owing to the assumption that any skill can be learned simply by following a set of instructions; the fact that she had to practice writing over time to get into the habit and had to have something to say came as a nasty shock.
• The constant discovery that a six year old boy likes such things as playing in the dirt, rude noises, loud games, gross-out stuff, sports, running, jumping and talking loudly instead of sitting very quietly and not doing anything like she would if she were in his place is, as evidenced by her responding to it by looking as if she had seen an unusally bloody fifty-car pileup, fairly traumatic.
• During the rare periods that she does try disciplining her children, she's always traumatized by the knowledge that they resent it; this leads to her pulling her punches when she should be trying to be consistent. The end result is that her need to be liked makes her life worse.
• This also explains why she never quite got the knack of pet ownership; since she can't imagine herself as being a life-form that cannot understand any more of spoken language than the tone of a speaker's voice and can't wrap his shaggy mind around what causation is, she can't realize that Farley will never want what she wants because he can't think like a human being or know anything more about a situation than that the human is angry again.
• It even explains her flaking out when it comes to childproofing; as I've said before, she seems to think that since she herself would not drink drain cleaner, swallow a tack or stick a barette in a wall socket, her children would have her knowledge of the risks and not do so either.

It’s not simply Elly’s refusal to admit that she doesn’t actually like the idea of writing that ensures that she’ll blow off the course she’s taking now only to repeat the cycle until she finally purges the need to be literary out of her system. Her lack of any real imaginative capacity and ignorance of how things actually work has led her to believe that learning to be a writer is similar to learning how to cook tuna cardiac-arrest casseroles and greaseburgers with extra bacon; instead of following Connie’s ham-fisted suggestion of simply writing things, Elly sincerely believes that she needs a degree of some sort to prove to the world that she’s allowed to be an author. The odd thing is that she had to wait until the jerk publisher of the Valley Voice decided to guilt trip her into working for free to part-way disabuse herself of this Tab-A-into-Slot-B way of thinking; since she got her name in print and even got her Elegy for Broken Washing Machine published, she got her literary itch scratched and was able to stave off the desire to go back to school for a few years….whereupon the cycle repeated itself. Where Elly strays from the path of common sense is by making the assumption that a writing class will do more than teach her technical skills; the woman who whined about the insanely high number of essays required by the last course she took doesn't seem to realize that she not only needs to practice in order to hone her skills, she also has to have something to say in the first place. No course can make ideas appear where none exist. As an example of that, I'd like to talk about something I saw on a late-evening walk a few weeks ago; it was overcast for most of the day but in the last hour or so of daylight, the sun appeared through breaks in the clouds as it started to clear up. I like when that happens because the angle of the sunlight shining on the cloudy eastern skies made it look as if the trees, leaves and houses weren't being illuminated solely by the Sun. It was as if they had an inner light of their own that was waiting for that moment to shine. This thing that I don't have a name for doesn't last long because the clouds always recede in a few minutes but it is something that makes me feel good. Elly would look at that and simply see that she needed to pester John about raking up leaves.

Here's a question that's bothered a lot of people and deserves a good answer: if Elly wants to write so badly, why doesn't she just shut up and write? It's not as if she really needs a degree in English in order to express herself; if she wanted to write as badly as she said she did, she'd simply get out there and do it. It seems to me that her hiding behind the wreckage of her academic failure is simply her way of avoiding having to admit that she doesn't really want to write at all; she got it into her head that she should be a writer but simply doesn't have it in her to create anything that isn't whining about how being a suburban mother with poor time management skills is the worst fate ever. From what we've seen, she seems to have been designed to do endless loads of clothes, give her children questionable advice and cook fatty foods; getting her to admit it and and feel good about being what she is is an impossibility owing to her other feature: the need to complain and garner sympathy.

As you know, the generally-accepted theory is that Elly will miss another class due to illness, fail to keep up with her course work and thus be forced to give up on her attempt to get her first-year English in; we can also look forward to misguided wingnut John coming to the silly conclusion "University plus Elly equals Illness due to exhaustion" and trying to convince her of the same odd premise. The problem is that she isn't going to be sufficiently martyred if that happens nor sufficiently resentful of her family; being the only one whose back bends or capable of doing loads of clothes isn't going to make the cut either. What has to happen is that the Pattersons suddenly are forced to not be able to make better arrangments for Mike so that he has no chance to avoid getting sick; this means that Elly has to either relapse or delay getting better to look after him. This also allows confused philosopher John to come up with the brain fart "Elly plus outside interests equals disaster" and have a new incentive to feel her pain but still insist that she wait until the kids are older before getting a job or working towards her B.A.

I'm probably going to get a lot of flack for saying this but Elly doesn't seem to know how to take very good care of herself when she's not feeling well. To start with, the part of her that cannot abide not doing anything seems to always win out over the part that remembers that she has to rest; this is why she got out of bed and did her daily monster load of laundry. It wouldn't have ruined her day if she'd let it slide or had John do it when he got home from work just as it wouldn't have upset the balance of the cosmos if she were to remind her family that their backs bend so they can jolly well pick up after themselves. Also, her inability to plan ahead has left her with no real choice but to have to go out in public to retrieve Mike, infect a lot of people and spend the rest of the day running herself ragged chasing after him; this is because it simply didn't occur to him to have him go to Annie's for the day and have a friend do that for her. Her befuddled incapability to do the simplest things without making a complete botch of them means she's sicker longer and harder than other people her age.

The current series that depicts Elly struggling with what was in the original timeline a summer cold that came out of nowhere and is now a fever that will somehow destroy her academic hopes has inspired me to talk about how the Pattersons deal with disease. We saw an inkling as to how things are meant to be done last Winter when Mike had the cold that made him miss what was supposedly Deanna's moving away to Burlington forever; Elly's initial reaction was not to sympathise with his plight but to lecture him about containment. Only when she was that he was upset did it occur to him to comfort him. She was a fairly competent caregiver despite the rocky start I'd mentioned; she even had a brief twinge of awareness that made her realize how difficult it must have been for her mother to care for her. Another instance in which we saw Elly-as-nurse was when John threw his back out; as I mentioned before, she'd made sure to keep the kids from bothering while he rested up. This occasioned a strip that had him wonder why nobody was around to cheer him up; this brings me to my point: that when Elly needs people, they are nowhere to be found. Lynn's need to make Elly into a martyr and her husband and children into ungrateful jerks is the engine that drives a lot of annoying strips that have our protagonist hack and wheeze as she's forced to do housework despite being ill; John and the kids cannot by nature pitch in and lighten her burden because Elly is always right.

Most of what was wrong with the strip that appeared on 15 November 2009 was based on its celebration of domination for its own sweet sake; Elly had the same need to force one of the lesser creatures who surround her to admit that she was totally in the right to insist on behaving like a violent and selfish lunatic as she did when she browbeat Michael into admitting that she was right to steal his candy. This seems to be a symptom of what is really wrong with Elly as a person; she seems to want everyone around her to do her bidding and admit that they have no right to opinions which differ from her own. Given how any sort of frustration is greeted by either rage or martyrdom, it's clear that she sees holding a point of view that is not in tune with her needs is an attempt to totally dominate her and make her admit that she has no right to free will. This is why Straw-man John is cast as a tyrant. This is why she's a lousy mother, pet owner and wife. This is why she's either boiling over with rage or whining about being oppressed. If her desires were capable of being sated, she'd be a happier person with a better life.

As I said a while back, Elly, despite believing otherwise, has a fairly rich fantasy life; the chiefest one seems to me to be her odd idea that Farley is somehow a human being in a suit. Now, I know that it's only human to anthropomorphize your pets to an extent; the child in all of us assumes that if something is alive, it must be able to think and feel as we do. This belief doesn't totally go away as we get older but it is tempered with the realization that even with the best will in the world, our pets aren't going to love us in exactly the same way we love them. Since Elly never had a pet growing up and she's fairly immature, she's still pretty much a stubborn little girl when it comes to thinking about Farley. Most of their interactions are based on her tetchy refusal to have to admit that her dog isn't really human. It isn't just, of course, her whacked-out belief that if she pleads or yells enough, Farley will see the error of his ways and act in accordance to her whims; her need to ascribe human motives to him extends beyond assuming that he's simply being stubborn and pretending that he doesn't know English to assigning John-like lechery to his instinctive need to mate with receptive females. The first instance that I can recall was during the sequence that Lynn turned into the kids' book; instead of following his nose to a kiddie party, he and the other intact male dogs were busy chasing after an intact female in heat. Upon being told what it was he was chasing, sour-puss idiot Elly yelled "MEN!!" and went on to give John the cold shoulder for putting ideas in their dog's head; the next time, of course, was when April accidentally introduced him to Connie's dog so that his replacement Edgar might be born. Elly's reaction to that was much the same. It doesn't take too much effort to realize why Elly won't admit that she needed to think of Farley as not being human; having to admit error is something unfair that she hates.

Since Lynn wants to make the Pattersons more accessible to her audience by making them uglier, dumber, more selfish and lower-class than her target demographic, it only stands to reason that she should further strain credibility by making what should be the upper-middle class family of the moderately-prosperous dentist John is look as if they're barely treading water financially. This not only means that we have to deal with the sort of lousy diet that is sterotypically associated with low income families, we also have to endure strip after strip that shows us that the Pattersons are simply too poor to hire someone to give Elly a level of back-up in the domestic sphere. Oh, sure, there was that one sequence where they experimented with having a housekeeper but Lynn felt that her audience couldn't identify with the Pattersons if we had Elly wanting to tidy up before the maid got there was a permanent fixture; the odd thing is that Sherwood Schwartz didn't have that worry, if you catch my meaning.

As I said a while ago, Lynn seems to want to make Elly's being forced to quit the class into a horrible twist of fate that deprives the world of an eager and talented writer. The reason she's doing so is to show the world how hard her life would have been if she had not had the opportunity to share her point of view with the world. The method by which she's going to inflict a Batiuk-like catastrophe is by reusing a motif we saw in the "Letters from Elly" phase of Coffee Talk. As we all know, she was trying to pick up First-Year English only to miss a few classes because she got sick; since she couldn't keep up, she let things slide and quit the course. At the time, we thought little of it because of the questionable nature of the letters; since her having to give up something she wants because she's sick is about to be canon, the effect I expected her quitting to have on the straight reprint era will be magnified. I should think that John might try to put his foot down because of an exaggerated, unwarranted and hypocritical-looking concern for her well-being; since it will take him decades to figure out how much this hurt, he gets to look far worse a man than he originally did.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that Lynn seems to have no real idea how other people perceive the strip; as an example, she spent years not realizing that a lot of people really hated the idea of Anthony and Elizabeth rekindling their high-school romance because it never occurred to her that people hated how limiting that concept was and how much they despised the person she was trying to depict as a sympathetic male lead who'd gotten in over his head. The problem as I see it is trying to determine why this might be; since she gets sort of evasive and testy when confronted, our best bet is to read the strip to see what's going on in her mind. What we see a lot of the time is a character being chided for worrying about superficial things like their appearance or how other people might interpret their behavior; that is, of course, when the critical opinion of others is not dismissed out of hand. It would seem that life is too short to please people who care enough to ask questions; it's best to accept the ignorant praise of the Connies of the world who don't care enough to want to help.

On this Remembrance Day, I'd like to take a look back at one of the high points of the strip: Lynn's honoring of those who served their country in time of war. The first time I can recall that she'd handled the issue was back in 1988 when a reluctant Mike had to attend a Remembrance Day ceremony. He didn't quite see the point and, since Lynn makes John and Elly more accessible by making them nitwits and lousy citizens, he had no substantive parental help seeing the point. He actually had to attend before he got the message. She dealt with the day in later years by having a Sunday strip close to Remembrance Day to remind us what the veterans did for us all. Here's what she did after 1996:

• 1997: After buying a poppy from a Legionnaire, Elly says that it's a good thing that April isn't exactly sure what a war is. I can't fault her logic there.
• 1998: No entry for that year.
• 1999: John talks to April about Jim's reluctance to discuss his experiences in the Second World War.
• 2000: Jim participates in a Remembrance Day ceremony; April asks why there are so few veterans left.
• 2001: The strip that links 11 September with 11 November.
• 2002: Jim thinks to himself that he marches to remember those who cannot.
• 2003: No entry.
• 2004: No entry.
• 2005: Elizabeth and Vivian Crane prepare for a Remembrance Day celebration; as could be expected, Liz is the one learning the lesson.
• 2006: The first strip set after Jim's stroke; April asks Elly when people will stop waging war.
• 2007: The strip that has a semi-awake Jim remember his experiences in the war; Iris tells Meredith that he slept through the whole thing.
• 2008: No entry.
• 2009: Lizzie yells STOP FIGHTING.

I've noticed a trend with these strips; usually, it's a female member of the younger generation that has to learn the lesson Lynn is trying to impart. You can take that to mean anything you want it to. Also, it's one of the few things that she does really well because it's something she's given a certain amount of thought to. It's not much but it does remind us why we used to like the strip and mourn the decline in quality in the last ten years.

In yesterday's Coffee Talk, Lynn made the long-expected arch remark about having to quit because mean people keep picking on her by expecting her to keep track of what she calls her characters, when her strip is set, how children actually behave and a whole bunch of other details she's too impatient to worry about. This, of course, is an example of a thing called the wounded gazelle gambit in which a shallow, childish, selfish manipulator whines about mistreatment to work on the sympathies of well-meaning but ignorant people; since I've fallen for this from her myself, I can tell you it works like all get-out. This gives me hope that she'll more or less admit that we're not seeing a new imaging of the Pattersons' lives in the present day but a director's cut of the original story; also, since she's disguised her essential apathy with what she publishes with a bunch of blame-deflecting static about haters and picky-faces, actually re-run the Connie-goes-to-Montreal sequence. That's because Lawrence demonstrates a belief of hers when she returns home empty-handed; he was fine about his injuries until she showed up whereupon he started crying bellowing Mommy-mommy-mommiiiiieeeeee!!! This reminded me of something that happened later: when John and Elly were leaving for their first kid-free vacation, Lizzie was at the airport screaming and crying about being left behind until they were out of earshot. Since they were not present to be made to feel guilty about having time to themselves, there was no longer any point in crying so she stopped. This is, of course, because of Lynn's characters are her and share her need to act all upset in order to force people to feel bad about wanting things she doesn't.