I'm afraid your friend is right, and that you are practicing False Laziness. By refusing to do the required work up front, you are damning yourself to more work overall. If you learn Emacs, you'll be more truly Lazy, for you'll save yourself work overall. If you learn Vi, you'll be even Lazier, because Vi requires fewer keystrokes for a given task. (Quoth Petruchio, the grinning troll)

Your Impatience, too, is False Impatience. True Impatience is the anger you feel when your computer tries to make you do its work for it. Pico is one of your computer's devious tools, with which it makes you its willing slave. I know; I used to be a Pico user... though from ignorance, not willfulness.

Unfortunately, you've really painted yourself into a corner, now. The Honest thing to do would be to admit defeat... but Honesty isn't one of the virtues of a programmer, and it can be terribly annoying. Your alternatives are limited... you may:

• *sigh* Learn Emacs
• Learn Vim, and insist that that's different than learning Vi
• Make some bet which you can honorably lose, and switch to Vi to fill your end of the bargain. I suggest betting that your roommate can't do something really unpleasant.
• cp vim pico or ln vim pico Another win on technicality, because you're running a program called pico. Having to type an extra two letters (as vi is often a link to vim or another clone) to invoke your editor, though, remains a serious compromise.
• Move out

There are probably some other good options. Be creative, but realistic; your objective is not to continue flogging yourself with Pico, but to save face. In any case, take solace in knowing that Vi isn't actually hard to learn at all, and you can extend it to do cool things using Perl.

Now say 20 Hail Larrys, write a script of contrition (using a real editor), and next time you come back it'd better just be fornication or something.