Confessions of a teenaged video game addict

Dear Doctor BS,

I'm in a lot of trouble. My first semester of college is almost over, and I haven't been to class in weeks. I can't study. Not when there are video games to be played. My roommate has a wii, and since the first time I tried it, I've been hooked. I'm pretty sure I'm flunking everything, and the add/drop date is past. My parents are going to freak out when they get my grades. I'll probably be kicked out of school. I know I need to quit this and buckle down, but I just can't make myself do it. What can I do?

JA

Dear JA,

Plenty of people might advise you on various ways to break the hold of an addiction. Meetings, therapy, meditation, exercise, graphs and charts and gold sticker stars. They might remind you of how hard you've worked to get where you are today. They might tell you to think before you throw it all away. They might say it's not too late for you, it's never too late. But they would be wrong.

You have passed the point of no return. You are going to fail, no way out of it. And sure, you could pull out of your current spiral and fail with a hard fought 55%. You could leverage all this guilt you're feeling, take the middle path, the golden mean.

Or you could go for the gusto, fail spectacularly. Don't just get a zero in every class, but make sure to piss off your professors in the process. Go to the final exam and sleep through it, snoring and drooling. Or make a fleet of paper airplanes out of the test papers and fly them all over the room. Or show up in a loincloth and try to make a bonfire with your books, using the final as kindling.

You're days in school are numbered, so start counting them down. Quit sleeping, order pizza for every meal, play video games until you collapse from exhaustion. If you give up and become ordinary now just because you're afraid of failure, you'll go on being ordinary the rest of your life. So go on, set a record.

Doctor BS