If You Think YOUR Christmas Preparations Are Stressful. . .

Again one of the guiding themes of my comedy is that I'm often mocking myself. I'm a deeply flawed human being, as all human beings are, and I know myself intimately, so that gives me a never-ending source of incongruities to joke about. In Panel One, I'm mocking my own inability to spell Hanukkah. (I mean, that's not a problem now, but late 2018 - early 2019 it was impossible to remember wether there were two n's or two k's.)

These sorts of things, annoyingly enough, give Ava plenty of justification for her massive guilt complex (see her Characters list page). She lives in a house with a pair of troublemakers, and she feels that if she doesn't spend her every waking moment watching them, she is personally responsible for everything they do.

Truth is, Rachel has a much better claim to that rationale for most of the stuff she just listed. Who didn't replace that frayed wire? Who brought a very flammable tree into a house that happens to house a woman who is extraordinarily gifted at lighting things up? Who allows Anne to remain under this roof anyway?

Also, it'd be easier for Rachel to fix most of the crap Anne and Esther do than it would be for Ava to prevent all of it as she feels she must do. Rachel was already resigned to having to deal with Doomdreg's penchant for destruction for years, and she's phenomenally wealthy, with that resolution in mind property damage is worth nothing to her - certainly it's not worth Ava destroying herself over a completely imagined requirement. Rachel does not have nice things because she swore allegiance to her psycho death cat and promised she'd never abandon him. Rachel does not care about property damage because she know Doomdreg is going to wreck everything she has including her own body at least three times and she has prepared for this. It's a special case, and Ava knows this.