The week before Spring Break, my roommate, Abram, made the greatest Internet discovery since Charlie Sheen’s Twitter account: the Nicolas Cage Megapack.

For seven days, Abram waited patiently by his computer as it downloaded 32 classic movies starring the greatest actor of this (or any) generation. By the week’s end, he had instant access to Cage’s endless repertoire of Oscar-worthy performances in artistic films like ‘Faceoff,’ ‘The Rock’ and the critically acclaimed ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’

Oh, and by ‘Oscar worthy,’ ‘artistic’ and ‘critically acclaimed,’ I mean ‘movies in whicha lot of stuff blows up.’

For Abram, thatmeant a week of giddy anticipation as he gladly sacrificed half of his computer’s memory space for a lifetime’s worth of entertainment from his childhood idol and adult role model. For me and my other roommate, Josh, thatmeant no Internet access for the duration of the download.

We took our challenge like men. Granted, it wasn’t easy, but we knew that if our parents lived their entire childhoodsbefore the Internet was even a twinkle in Al Gore’s eyes, we could make it a week without breaking down and hijacking our neighbors’ Internet access to ‘poke’ a friend on Facebook.

At least, I thought we could.

As it turns out, seven days with no email, no instant messaging, no social networking and no YouTube clips of monkeys playing with themselves feel more like an eternity than one week. As much as I hate to admit it, I am a slave to the World Wide Web.

Sadly, I don’t think I’m any different from the average Syracuse University student in this respect. Could you imagine if everyone on campus lost the Internet for an extended period of time? It would be catastrophic.

Without Wikipedia, we’d have to find our information from real, accurate sources in the library, which will be impossible to find without Google Maps.

Without email, we’d have to deliver all of our messages either by hand or through old-fashioned postage, which — how does that work again? Arehorsesstill used?

Without Facebook, our entire social structure wouldcrumble when we realize nobody actually has 1,174 friends, and people care even less about your status when you tell them about it in person.

Still, nothing can compare to the seismic shift in daily entertainment that would surely be forced upon us should we be disconnected from the Internet. Many SU students spend most of their downtime surfing the Web, reading written content, streaming videos, downloading television reruns or exploring exotic pornographic websites that experiment with Korean aquatic life and far eastern cuisine. You know, if that’s your thing.

When those avenues of amusement disappear, what will fill our time? Suddenly, the 24 hours in each day that used to seem so inadequate would become interminable.

Luckily for me, if and when the Internet apocalypse strikes down all of our Wi-Fi, I’ve got 32 of the greatest movies ever made readily available on my roommate’s hard drive. Unfortunately, most of you don’t live with anyone who has Abram’s discerning taste in cinema, so you might need some non-Nicolas Cage alternatives.

Of course, you could be responsible and use the extra hours each day for schoolwork and exercise to become the best possible version of you.But that’s already what I tell people I’m doing when I’m really downloading Korean aquarium porn, and nobody buys my story.

If that doesn’t work out, you could try to replace each Internet pleasure with its non-Web counterparts, but watching TV on an actual TV and reading news in a real newspaper seem like a giant waste of time. Just don’t tell my editors I said that.

Then again, if we substituted all Internet porn for its real-life counterpart, there’s a good chance guys like me would finally achieve the social life we’ve only dreamt of while traveling through Korean cyberspace.

Hmm… Come to think of it, who needs the Internet, anyway?

Danny Fersh is a junior broadcast journalism major, and his columns appear every Wednesday. He would like his readers to know that his Korean fetish and Abram’s Nicolas Cage obsession are in no way related, except for the Korean porno Cage starred in the late ’70s. He can be reached at dafersh@syr.edu.