Heather is a genius. I would stay with Jack anyway, despite the fact that everything she writes is true. He would protect me! Right before a terrorist killed/kidnapped/hurt me because I was close to him. It would be worth it.

5:52. The game hasn’t started yet, but they’ve been filling up programming now for several hours. How do they do it? I am not interested enough to find out.

5:54. A good drinking game: identify the celebrity voice-over. There’s not much too it. Just drink when someone knows who’s speaking. Hint: it’s always Gene Hackman.

6:00. Game starts! Right? No? Okay then. Time for beer. Tom Brady looks cute in that credit card commercial, but he’s probably scarily enormous in real life.

6:05. The National Anthem should be coming up soon. Last night’s Saturday Night Live had a sketch about this; not so funny. It just occurred to me that it might not actually be sung by Aretha Franklin, Aaron Neville, and that third guy. Will be interesting to see.

6:10. I have been misled. This is not the start of the game. This is the official Full Throttle Pre-Game Show. Full Throttle, in case you were wondering, is an energy drink from Coca-Cola. Why am I here?

To be totally honest, I wasn’t really planning on watching the Superbowl. The “code black” Grey’s Anatomy on afterward? Hell yeah. But as I don’t really care for the towns of — wait a second, I’ll be right back — Detroit, Pittsburgh, and the other town, what the eff, Superbowl.com, where the eff are the Seahawks from? ah yes, Seattle — and football can be kind of a “long” game with many “pauses” and lots of inane “commentary,” I felt that I might sit this one out. But we shall see.

It’s not a very auspicious way to begin this blog, but I have a confession to make: I like watching Medium.

Medium follows soccer-mom-slash-psychic Alison Dubois as she solves extraordinarily brutal crimes, one trippy dream sequence at a time. Alison is played by Patricia Arquette, who I have never liked in anything, but is appropriately chubby and passive-agressive for the part. The rest of the cast is low-key (to the point of mumbling) and likeable, especially hot scientist-slash-husband Joe and endearingly kooky middle child Bridget.

But I know what you’re thinking. Maggie, you’re thinking, what are you doing? This is a show about a soccer mom who is also a psychic. Are there two roles in society that could be further from your own? What kind of ridiculous concept are you going to accept next? What about this show, exactly, made you put it in the “record all episodes” list?

Well, I’ll tell you, world. It scares the crap out of me. And then it makes me feel better.

You’d think that after a while Alison’s dream sequences would tend to fall into a pattern, and then cease to be scary. But you would be wrong. Alison’s participation in the dream is always changing. She’s the killer. She’s the victim. She’s a helpless bystander. She’s watching it all like a movie. It’s happening literally. It’s an elaborate metaphor. It never happened at all.

And even when her dreams aren’t about violence and psychopaths and people-butchers and whatnot, they manage to get to some real psychological ickiness. For example, in a show I just watched, Alison kept having dreams that she was in a mental hospital, and that no one believed she was Alison. It would happen slowly: she forgets her ID badge. Her car’s not in its usual place. Someone else is in her house. And then all of a sudden she’s been manhandled into a mental facility, and no one can look sane when they’re being dragged down a dark hallway by two enormous men in lab coats. It’s scary, the idea that you could be hallucinating your whole life. That in fact the real you is locked in a dark room someplace being pushed around by Nurse Ratched and getting electroshock therapy.

And then, in the end, Alison always finds a way to gain power from her dreams. She catches the bad guy, she solves the riddle. The dreams aren’t scary any more because she knows what they mean. She can take the muddled inconsistencies that float into her brain and act on them, and isn’t there something kind of admirable in that? Yes, she is a psychic soccer mom. But aren’t we all?

Hello world, welcome to TiFaux, and my very first ever blog posting. I’m nervous, so try not to judge me.

There will be other contributors, soon. There will be much talk of Jack Bauer and Veronica Mars. And there will be mocking, oh the mocking there will be.