by John "I should'a listened to my mama" Bocskay

Author's disclaimer: Despite my best efforts and good intentions, the following may contain some inaccuracies. It may even be utter bullshit.

* * *

The truth is I'm lazy. I do the work I have to do, but seldom anything more. I regularly turn down private lessons, even very lucrative ones, not because of any respect for the immigration laws, but simply because I don't believe in working harder than I have to. After all, I didn't come to Korea to work.

Well, actually, I did. I teach about 20 hours a week at a local university, and my planning time and paperwork rounds it out to about thirty hours. Between vacation time, holidays, and school festivals, I have about three months of the year off, which is one of the things that attracted me to the job in the first place--it was one big step toward my ultimate career goal, which is to work about half the year and take the other half off. I like my job, but I'm trying to work less, not more.

I'm lazy, and in the summer, in the muggy, sweaty summer, I ride my inertia down to even lower depths. In July, I can't seem to find the energy to do anything more than drink beer and occasionally consider doing some work, and in August, even drinking beer seems a chore.

I've tried to overcome my laziness several times and failed, most recently in August, when I walked over to a local gym (considering the walk itself to be a pretty good workout), paid for a one month membership, and never returned. I looked for a self-help book on laziness but found that there weren't any that were any good. Apparently the true experts in that field never get around to writing books, and the books that do make it to print are written by people who are far too industrious to be taken seriously.

I work well under pressure, but these days I seldom find myself under sufficient pressure to work. Anyone who's ever seen a TV weather report knows that a low pressure system (like me) needs to collide with a high pressure system for the really interesting shit to happen.

A few weeks ago I was busy procrastinating in front of my computer, and I came across a small ad on PusanWeb asking for people willing to help out with the website. I don't have any computer skills, but the ad asked for "regular contributing writers". Hmmm....I'd submitted a few things in the past months--nothing "regular"--and I'd always meant to send more, but it was hard to find the time between naps and PC game marathons. When I read the ad, I got excited; this could be the pressure I was looking for.

So I called Jeff Lebow (The Big Cheese at PusanWeb) and asked him about it. I've never met or spoken with Jeff, so I didn't know if he'd be one of those hard-nosed editors, sleeves rolled up, bull neck and hair protruding from his shirt collar, hounding me to turn in copy or else. I imagined--and hoped--he'd look and sound something like Ed Asner or Peter Parker's boss in the old Spiderman cartoons, a bulldog with a flat-top and a cigar.

But Jeff turned out to be pretty laid-back. The voice on the other end was cool, didn't sound like a cigar smoker, and he was saying some very un-bulldoglike things. He said, more or less, that I could do whatever I want.

"But will there be a deadlline?" I wondered, "some pressure?"--I happily imagined the yoke being lowered onto my neck, whip at my heels, like Conan the Barbarian when he had to turn that big drill all by himself with the strength of ten oxen--so I asked him.

"I'd like it to be regular, but I'm not pushing for exact dates or anything. You think you can give me something every two weeks?"

"Uh, I think I can do that," I said, and with those seven words I became a PusanWeb "regular contributing writer".

* * * * * * * *

Regular contributing writer....no, that title just won't do--doesn't sound important enough. I'd never been hung up on important sounding titles before, mainly because I've never had one, but all that has changed in Korea, the country where taxis are driven by engineers and the coffee in the office is made by managers and executive something-or-others. So what to call myself?Columnist is a nice title. I started imagining how important it would look on the new business cards I would be printing: John Bocskay, Columnist. But is it too short? Does that one word say it all?

As I fished around for a title it occured to me that if cabbies could make themselves engineers, I could be anything I wanted. Why settle for mere columnist when I can be a creative consultant, advising myself on where the commas should go? Depending on what I write about, I could be a journalist, essayist, humorist, or critic. And if I learn to post the pieces on the site myself, that makes me a computer engineer, a web designer, an executive editor, and a publisher. I'm no rocket scientist--though there's nothing stopping me anymore--but I realized that my already exaggerated resume was about to take a quantum leap forward. And if my last resume landed me a pretty good job, my new one was going to make me, if not God, at least the guy who makes his coffee, which must carry a very impressive title.

* * * * * * * *

I hadn't settled in to my new gig for very long before I realized that--whatever I chose to call myself--being a regular contributing writer would mean contributing writing regularly. I enjoy writing, but writing a column might be like...work. And it would be work I'd be doing without pay. I've done labors of love in the past, but they always ended up seeming less love than labor. One thing I've learned about myself is that I need some incentive, something to push me. So what, if not money, would push me to write the column?

Fame. Ah! I started to imagine the people of Pusan, riveted to their computer screens, alternately laughing and crying, feeling the whole range of human emotion, being amused, angered, inspired, insulted, uplifted.....My articles are translated into Korean and discussed in the highest circles. At the next inter-Korean summit meeting, by way of making some preliminary small talk, Kim Jong-il leans over to Kim Dae-jung and asks, "So..what'd you think of Bocskay's latest piece on Student Radicalism and Democracy?" because, being the able conversationalist that he is, he wisely begins with topics that the two are absolutely certain to have in common....My students actually begin to study because they want to read the column in the original language, because they know it could very well pop up as a question on a job interview--a test of how hip and connected they really are--and they want to have a leg up on the competition.....And here I am accepting my Pulitzer for my expose on "Inertia in the Korean English Classroom." Jimmy Breslin is there, and Studs Terkel, and Walter Cronkite (I don't care if he's dead, this is MY fantasy), and look! there, in the front row hanging on my every word, it's a 28-year-old Sophia Loren! I step up to the mike, "I'd like to thank my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Frances Amorosano, without whom I would have surely ended up dangling my participles in the showers at Attica State Penitentiary...."

Actually, I'd be happy to simply break free of my intertia every two weeks and have proof of it on the internet. So much for my motivation.

* * * * * * * *

So, I've got both the gig and the motivation for writing the column. Now, what to call it? I thought a humble, self-deprecating title would be good. Something like Utter Bullshit or From the Horse's Ass, but I discarded those because I thought it would make it hard to gain the trust of my readership. The Straight Dope? I like that--it can be read as the real story, and "dope" also suggests "drug", contrasting nicely with the "straight". And dope also means "jackass" or "dummy", which is plenty self-deprecating but subtle. That's it! The dummy telling the real story..

Which raises a good question--what story, what will I write about? Jeff said "whatever you want". Big help, he is. "Too much liberty is a bad thing". Who said that? Maybe it would help if I wrote some kind of mission statement. Yeah.

Whenever I hear the words mission statement, I think of the intro segment of the original Star Trek ("Our five year mission...."). It's a good mission statement, and I think I'm going to make it my own.

-"To explore strange new worlds..."--That's good, and apropos, considering I live in a strange new world and occasionally visit others.

-"...to seek out new life and new civilizations..."--Not exactly new civilizations, but new to me. And I'll interpret "new life" to mean, not new species, but new ways of living, which I stand a much better chance of finding. There might be an undocumented species living in the DMZ, but unless it's lighter than the minimum weight necessary to set off a land mine, it has almost certainly been blown up. If I do happen to discover a new species, you can read about it here.

-"...to boldly go where no man has gone before"--Okay, that's stretching a little. These days it's just about impossible to go where no man has gone before, though I've had some interesting ideas concerning the women's locker room at my local bathhouse. In short, we've been everywhere. And with the exception of the moon, women have been to all of those places too. (There is even a woman who works on the men's floor at the bathhouse. She's a massuese. The men don't seem to mind.) So I'll reinterpret this phrase to mean "places I've never gone before". And I'll keep the boldly. I like that.

* * * * * * * *

So, I've got the gig, the motivation, and the mission statement, but now I see that I've run out of space. I guess I'll have to start next time.

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