If you asked me to pick my litter of choice, I would select cigarette butts over discarded chewing gum every day, and here's why.

Chewing gum is the nastiest invention ever to grace God's green earth, even when compared to spray-on hair and polyester pants suits.

My little sister and I both have an absolute aversion to gum, to the point that we shudder and make warding signs against evil whenever the word even passes our lips. I'm talking violent physical illness even at the thought of being in the presence of chewed gum.

So many reasons why:

• the dull, chomping motions of chewer's mouths

• the excess saliva produced

• people in high school bragging about transferring the gum in their mouth into their boyfriend's mouth during particularly 'hot' kisses

• people twirling gum in little strings around their finger

• people tucking gum into little paper balls or parking it on the corner of their plate...'for later'

• people blowing tiny half-bubbles on the edge of their tongue, and then popping them so as to send wafting out a puff of sickly-sweet gum smell

• people spitting their gum out willy-nilly on the street/public transportation/what have you, or, better yet, sticking it on walls, door frames, or table bottoms

I know cigaratte smokers cause cancer and all that, but at least their waste is biodegradable. Gum on the sidewalk is there forever, no matter how much mr street vendor blasts at it with his water hose. Everyone is all up in arms about all the damage smokers cause. Where the hell is the society against gum chewers who leave nasty, sticky deposits everywhere?

I know people past high-school age chew gum to freshen their breath or whatever, but given the choice between being face to face with a smacking gum-chewer and leaning near a neglecter of dental hygene, I am going with Tartar McSpinachTeeth every time. Seriously.

Just this Christmas, little sis and I were trying to convey to our brother how deeply we abhor gum and all its little witches. He is a big gum chewer and, in fact, helped push my disliking of gum down the slippery slope from mild annoyance to full-blown dry heaves, when he decided to conduct an 'experiment' one summer day by filling a plastic glass with water, a metal fork, and a piece of chewed grape gum, and then sticking this concoction in the freezer to see what happened.

Even had this 'experiment' not cracked the side of the glass, I could never have used it again, knowing that it had been in such close contact with gum. And on a sidebar, that grey-purple grape color is also hideous.

Anyway, he just couldn't fathom how intensely horrible we find gum. Little sis struggled to explain.

little sis: I can see someone who is totally attractive and everything I look for in a person, and then if they chew gum, they are dead to me. Dead. I don't even want to be near them.

me: Me too!

brother: That's nuts.

little sis: Look at it this way. Say there is this girl--the most beautiful girl ever--and she has a handful of poo, and she's eating the poo and smearing it all over her face.

me: Yeah, like that Sesame Street segment where the little girl in the white dress smears chocolate cookie all over the place.

little sis: Wouldn't that disgust you???

brother: I think that would disgust anybody. Doesn't it disgust you?

little sis and me, together: NOT AS MUCH AS GUM!

little sis: What about meat, vegan boy? It's like if you saw a beautiful girl smearing hunks of raw, bloody meat all over her face. That's how we feel about gum.

me: Oh yeah.

YUCK!!!