My roommate Micah is what I like to call a multitasker. In my world, that means he’s capable of playing not just one, but two videogames at the same time. In this case, one of them is an outer space role-playing game, while the other is online poker. Now there are several key points I would like to address. First, I would like to point out the fact that merely being able to play two games at the same time should serve as a testament to how boring both of those games are. If a form of entertainment is so uninvolving that you have to distract yourself with another very similar, also completely pointless distraction, then perhaps you should find another source of entertainment altogether.

I should express the fact that I do not condone online poker playing. It’s a dirty, dirty habit and Micah only gets away with it because he doesn’t go to Biola (I hear he also dances). Sick. So after saying that, it should be noted that Micah doesn’t only have entertainment on his mind. Micah is a man on a mission, and that mission involves making a profit of $10,000 off his online poker playing. He described his plan to me; it would be a gradual process, taking a little over two years to complete. The way I interpreted this was, “I’m going to take over the TV for the next two years while I play Mass Effect and online poker at the same time.” Two years? Come on.
I don’t even know if we’ll still have the Internet in two years. I assume by then the robot uprising will have already taken place and we’ll all be at work sending a muscular android back through time to the year 1984 in an effort to protect our leader, John Connor.

At no point do I ever doubt Micah’s seriousness or diligence in reaching his goal. I once saw the man play online chess for 16 hours straight. SIXTEEN HOURS. You could throw a cougar at me covered in Christmas lights, strapped with a jet pack, and shooting lasers out of its eyes, and I’d STILL somehow get distracted. Micah, on the other hand, is someone I can realistically see playing online poker and Mass Effect until he’s 80 years old.

Recently, I’ve formed a somewhat ironic addiction to the show “Intervention” on A&E. It inspired me to form a gathering to show Micah he has a problem and get him some help. This proved to be more difficult than I expected when I realized that I, too, have spent a substantial portion of my early life playing repeated games of Ape Escape, a game where you catch monkeys with a net and/or a banana boomerang, aka the bananarang. That, and my requests to add Chronic Over-Active Mass Effect, Online Poker Playing, and Maybe-Watching-College-Football-Too-Much-Syndrome to the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders have been repeatedly denied. It’s a sick world we live in.

I think what bothers me most about all of this is merely the fact that Micah will continue his extravagant inactivity with the reasoning that it really doesn’t affect anyone else in a negative way. At the same time, that kind of attitude is just as negative. When a man has the capacity to do good, to walk out the door and make a single positive impact, then in that case, not acting is a way to deprive the world. It is a harmful action.

So maybe I should put down the controller in my other hand.