Dilemma

Let's play a game. You be the naïve twit.

Once upon a time when you were younger and stupider, you trusted someone who used your naïveté to play you and sabotage you for their own amusement. You of course never saw it coming, and it broke your heart. Bad. Yet you walked away without doing anything about it because despite the cardiac damage, you sincerely believed that shutting up and forgiving (or at least forgetting) was the right thing to do.

Time, as it so often does, passes. Then one day out of the blue, Fate plays Bad Santa and presents you with a secret, sterling, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to settle the score between you and the one who abused your trust. As to the amount of damage you could cause with this opportunity . . . remember that bus/cargo plane explosion in Speed? On that scale.

P.S., all you have to do for the payback is tell the truth.

Do you:

a) Haul out the revenge C-4 and wire up those detonators.

b) Shut up and work harder on the forgetting thing you thought you had nailed.

c) Turn the whole unpleasant experience into a television show script -- sort of your personal version of Veronica Mars -- and sell it, and ask the casting director to let Charisma Carpenter or Harry Hamlin play the part of the jackass.

d) Check to see if the production team for Veronica Mars is hiring outside writers.

e) Remember that you don't write for television and that revenge is a dish best served frosty.

f) Plow your way through three pints of Häagen-Dazs creme brulee ice cream while imagining a bus smashing into a cargo plane.

g) Suffer acute brain freeze and pop an extra 10 mg of Lipitor because you're not allowed to have that much ice cream on your diet.

h) Ponder the frequency with which moral dilemmas like this get dumped into your lap.

i) Check the freezer to see if the kids ate that last popsicle you stashed behind the frozen peas.

j) Write a blog entry about your dilemma.

k) Write a blog entry about your dilemma worded in such a way as to make any number of jackasses from your past squirm.

l) Pray for strength.

m) Suspect that God has caller ID and He's dodging you again.

n) Go to the store and pace back and forth in front of the ice cream freezer while calling your pharmacist to see if it is possible to overdose on Lipitor or Häagen-Dazs.

o) Leave the ice cream, go home and clean the bathrooms. Not that they need it.

p) Admire the sparkling porcelain while asking yourself, Now what would Veronica Mars do?

q) Wish you were Kristen Bell, because she would at least have a script and Jason Dohring to work with. And brood.

r) Recall the philosophies of Sun Tzu and Ivana Trump, and brood a little more.

s) Discard Tzu and Trump, move on to Machiavelli and John Peter Zenger, and really get into the brooding in a big way.

t) Come to the conclusion that as sweet and satisfying as a big heaping dish of ice-cold revenge might be, it's still hitting back. Whatever that jackass has done, your rules say that you can't hit back. Ever. No matter how absolutely beautiful the roundhouse punch would feel.

u) Decide that you're still stupid, and that your rules suck, but they are the rules and idiocy has its own weird charm. Lucky for the jackass, eh?

v) Content -- if not particularly happy -- with yourself, the universe, etc., take an aspirin for the ice cream headache and get back to work.