Absence due to PackRat

I've just encountered the most addictive (for me) game on the internet. I was luring my friends to play with me but, now, I'm afraid that it's a mean thing to do. Because I can't stop playing! It's PackRat. It's part of facebook. I love it. I guess when I love things, I frequently obsess about them, but this is getting out of hand. I play at night, on weekends, all the time. I dream about it.
Let me explain: The game involves trading cards and "stealing" cards from your friends. Here's what the cards look like. You start out with a hand of cards and you try to make collections. The pictured cards are all in the "Sleep Tight" collection, as indicated by the icon in the bottom left corner. The bottom right corner is the value of the card so a high-value card can easily be swapped for a low value card but not vice versa. When you accumulate "credits," you can buy cards from "The Market." Like Barack Obama's and my approach to foreign relations, the best case scenario appears to be for everyone to team up and help each other. As far as I can see, cut-throat, every-player-for-herself PackRat hurts everyone (like my opinion on foreign relations).

So, you can only play with people who are your facebook friends. Consequently, since most of my friends don't play, I started asking the other players to be friends with me. This has turned out well in one instance. The friend who invited me and my one new friend help me get the collections that I need and I help them when I can (infrequently because, the longer you play, the easier the game gets for you, for several reasons). Also, I help the new friends I've lured on, in an attempt to encourage them to play, which helps me. In two instances, my random PackRat friends have turned out to be busts. One girl didn't know how to be courteous, I suspect. The other is a raving lunatic. Now, I didn't realize, at first, that you only screw yourself by being discourteous because, then, the things you are trying to collect get stolen and you have to keep them locked up tight, difficult for a newbie. So, I behaved badly and stole things from the lunatic. When my kindly friends explained to me how to play, I went back and apologized to the lunatic player. She snapped at me in return, lying, and telling me that that was the last card she needed to complete her collection. Also, she broke one of my locks (believe me, this isn't nice). Well, you can see the "vaults" of your friends, so I knew that she was lying about the card I had taken being the last one she needed and I found her a card that she needed, even though I couldn't find the one I had stolen. So, days pass and she seems okay. Until, at some point last night, the crazy lady decided that I was taking cards from one of her collections without asking. (By the way, I wasn't!) So she broke three of my locks and stole one of the cards that's really hard to make! Crazy! I de-friended her. It turns out that randomly picking packrat friends is not ideal.

Long story short, I've been thinking about this nasty packrat player all day. As soon as I de-friended her, I couldn't leave her any messages. So, I'm regretting that I didn't explain before I left that I hadn't taken any of her f-ing cards. Also, by the time she vandalized me, I had gotten a connection, via one of my other friends, to replace the card I had stolen. Maybe this doesn't makes sense, because I'm so comfortable with the lingo that I haven't explained things but the moral is that I have become totally overcome with this game, to the point that it is the primary drama in my life. I have written no blog entries in almost two weeks and now the only thing I can talk about is the lunatic packrat player. I walked to the bathroom (a long walk in my building) going over and over in my head what I should have said, before defriending the packrat player, and how that really would have shown her that she had made a mistake in treating me so badly. Crazy. I am totally crazy.