For years, I have artfully deflected my friends' increasingly ardent attempts to get me to join their fantasy football leagues. "It's fun!" they tell me. "It makes the games more fun to watch." Both of those things may be true, but I have chosen to not participate based on some hard-won self-knowledge: I don't tend to do things casually, or at least, not for very long. Either casualness morphs into its close cousin--boredom--or else the thing seizes my interest, and I pursue it with an ardor that most people would regard as almost obsessive.