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Buenos Aires – With only three days left on the two weeks’ notice he gave at the translation company where he works, Paul Rivas is visibly excited at his impending unemployment. In a move that elicited strange looks from his 23-year-old careerist workmate, sales team member Tyler Shahriary, Rivas is not leaving his cushy position as a translator in favor of another, better job. Instead, Rivas plans to dedicate himself full-time to being an életművész, a Hungarian term that roughly translates to “life artist”, or, as described in the book from which Rivas learned the term, “someone for whom work itself was déclassé.”

When asked if he wasn’t concerned that the man who called himself a life artist, the one from the book, was also known as the Whiskey Robber, and spent his days getting drunk on Johnny Walker black, robbing banks and post offices and blowing money in casinos on gambling and expensive hookers while ostensibly serving as fourth-string goalie for one of Budapest’s storied hockey teams, Rivas simply said, “Nem.”

However, he later added that wasn’t going to be that kind of life artist. As for the 40 hours per week he had heretofore spent translating, Rivas now intends to spend them taking walks down streets he’s never been, asking questions of old people sitting in parks, and putting in long hours at a few choice corner cafes where something interesting is liable to happen.

Yet his girlfriend has other plans for his period of self-imposed unemployment.

“Are you kidding me?” Clare Nisbet laugh-spoke. “Paul’s gonna be my house husband. He’s gonna do all the shit I’ve been doing for him since we came to this sodding country so that he could ‘follow his bliss’. He’s gonna make the bed in the morning, wash all the dishes, schlep the laundry back and forth to the cleaners and fold it when it’s done, pack me lunches, make me dinner and download my shows.”

“Unfortunately,” conceded Rivas, “those are the terms to which I’ve agreed. But this is Argentina, where what one agrees to do is often a far cry from what one actually does, and I think that applies to people with tourists visas, as well.”

The would-be life artist maintained that the world would be a better place if he were permitted to just do his thing.

“Just look at the life artist Bubba Ray Robison,” Rivas said with a tone of foregone obviousness. “He, like me, has yet to find a job that can keep him interested and, eventually, working at said job just makes him miserable. Maybe he’s an extreme example, in that he’s a mechanical engineer, and when he’s not paying attention at work people could die, but it’s the same idea. I plan on doing good work; just not for pay.”

Rivas claims he plans to do great things in his time off, things more valuable to the world and to his own peace of mind than translating advertisements for the Argentine version of Slingbox, but declined to disclose what those things might be.

All he said he could offer in the way of explanation was that: “Being a life artist is serious business. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. You don’t see many life artists.”