I am reassured by everyone who knows me that I am, in fact, a very interesting person. I know that this is so; should anyone fail to reassure me, I am apt to launch upon a discussion of all my good points with all the earnestness of a Jew for Jesus proselytizing in the subway. My friends and acquaintances have long since learned that the key to harmony is stroking my ego at every turn.

Take, for example, my accomplishments in the field of martial arts. Yes, it is a little-known fact about me: I have a black belt in karate. It seems like a very 1970s blaxploitation-movie claim to cool, but it is, in fact, very useful. Not only does my comprehensive knowledge of martial arts enable me to run around Central Park while dressed as a ninja, get out of hairy situations with pissed-off Yakuza thugs with my fluent knowledge of Japanese, and fly while swordfighting, but it also carries one additional fringe benefit. No, I'm not talking about enlightenment, though I expect that I'm far more spiritually advanced than your average cave-dwelling Daoist monk (after all, my apartment's smaller). Yes, you've guessed correctly: Having a black belt impresses chicks.

OK, none of that's really true. I took up martial arts seriously in college about eight years ago for a variety of reasons. I'd always wanted to learn martial arts because I was constantly getting bullied, beat up, and harassed in my youth. Also, though I'm about 6'2" and 210 pounds, I'm hardly what you'd call graceful, as is epitomized by the way I tripped over my Aunt Gladys' walker at my cousin John's wedding, spilling a plate of calamari on my grandmother's lap and causing my cousin's new wife, Marie, to do a header into the wedding cake. I thought studying martial arts might reduce the chances of such a fictional situation from reoccurring. But, most of all, I wanted to overcome my tendencies towards attention-deficit disorder and playing video games until 3 AM. In other words, I was looking for a bit of boot camp.

There's something to be said about the way in which standing in a line and practicing the same damn punch a hundred times builds character. Forget all that Mr. Miyagi crap: the first modern martial art was judo, which was synthesized by an educator named Jigoro Kano from several family traditions of jujitsu in the late 1800s. Kano was a major figure in Japan's modernization period, when the country's new government quickly came to understand the necessity of a strong army, both to resist Western colonialism and to push its own interests abroad. Judo was a part of this, using the new public education system to build strong, loyal citizen-warriors for the good of the state. Others of these new martial arts, or "gendai budo," such as kendo, naginata-do (for girls) and, of course, karate, which was introduced to Japan from Okinawa in the 1920s and was a more "Japanese" alternative to Western boxing, were structured by the Ministry of Education along the same lines. Their entire pedagogy is designed for mass instruction and building discipline.

Part of the legacy of the boot-camp origins of the modern martial arts is that the training can be brutal. Getting hit hurts. Banging your shins against someone else's shins hurts. Standing in horse stance for hours hurts. And, however tough you are, there's always someone tougher who's gonna kick your ass.

So, why do I spend Friday nights getting kicked in the head instead of doing something more sensible, like drinking? Honestly, because, besides the fact that I need to stay in shape, it gives me discipline. As you might have guessed, I'm a fucking slacker who would like nothing better than to stare at a computer screen, ranting about the military-industrial complex and playing Everquest twenty-five hours a day. The thing is, unless you have enough discipline to buckle down and do the things you'd rather not do, you'll never get anything accomplished. Karate not only reminds me of the necessity of sometimes doing things I'd rather not do, it also reminds me of my own limitations.

Finally, the fact of the matter is, after a day of sitting in front of a computer, clicking away, working out may hurt, but it hurts in a good way. I firmly believe that the reason that so many people are into sado-masochistic sex these days is because they need to be forced back into their own bodies. Unless you reconnect with your animal self, you're only living half of your life.

Boot to the head? Write editor@corporatemofo.com