RutabagaI have some topics I had considered blogging about whose titles I saved in my Dashboard. Things like “Guide to Effective Bitching” and “Breaking the Code” and “The Bitter Women Guide for Liars”. And then last week turned out to be a pretty overwhelming week for me, and so I considered writing about dealing with being overwhelmed. However since that mostly involves eating pie and taking naps, I decided that might not be as enthralling a topic as I had first thought.

But then I thought of something sinister. My dear friend, let’s call her Bunnie (hehehe), introduced me to an online game called Mafia . We play on a forum setup, and it’s basically a group of ordinarily nice people who get whipped up into a frenzy of suspicion, finger-pointing, and name calling for entertainment. Oh, and the person with the best command of the English language wins, because convincing others you’re innocent (even if you’re not) and convincing the other players why they should elminate someone else is part and parcel. (Woohoo… cliche alert! Do I get a prize?)

We’ve been playing our current game for a week, and it’s already changing my outlook. (Hmmm… maybe this is why life is overwhelming me. I’m playing forum games when I should be doing laundry. Naaah… nevermind that thought.)

Point is, I’ve started to see everything in terms of suspicion.

Here are two groups of people I find myself suspicious of. In Mafia game terms, we call this “The Finger of Suspicion”. I’ll just let you guys figure out which finger that is.

1) People who say they don’t dream. Anyone who went through the 5th grade knows everyone dreams, so why say you don’t? Is it to make yourself seem dark and mysterious? Well, I do wonder what kind of screwed up your brain life must be to not let yourself remember even random thoughts that most of us get while dreaming. I mean I get some good ones that are like epic movies, but mostly I get dancing hippos and wobbly landscapes. Even my sex dreams start out good, but then suddenly everyone turns into a rutabaga. Oh well. But at least I dream.

2) People who don’t read. I broke up with a guy once who didn’t read. I mean he could read, but he never did. No newspapers, novels, dry old biographies, comic books… not even a cereal box. I realise none of my Bitter Readers will fall into this category, because you’re reading this blog. (Ha! Caught ya!) But I tell you, it slightly distresses me that such people exist. The very concept that someone might get their entire view of life, culture, world events, and history based on Big Brother makes me just slightly short of breath (and not in a rutabaga way… in a panic attack way).

So, all of this to say to you non-dreamers, non-readers (you will tell them for me, won’t you?), I’ve got my eye on you, dammit.