Sangmin: Fifth Meeting

One of my favorite times is “Mind-Losing Time.” As an Honors student taking 17 hours of classes and trying to maintain a GPA for scholarship, I believe that sometimes Mind-Losing Time is necessary in order to preserve personal sanity. To go insane in order to stay sane might sound absurd, but these small moments of Mind-Losing Time help ease the overwhelming moments of the semester. You should try it.

What exactly is Mind-Losing Time? Mind-Losing Time is just a time to be silly—to laugh and not worry about what others think of you.

When Sangmin and I met for the fifth time, we had Mind-Losing Time indeed. Before we met, I texted Sangmin asking him if we wanted to do anything different besides have a normal conversation. We decided to play a video game online.

We ended up doing something entirely different. And crazy.

My friend Alexandra, who is a bit of a game nerd, came with me to the meeting. The three of us tried to find a game to play online, but none of us could decide on what to play. Somehow the conversation went from games to movies to TV shows. Since my computer was on (as we were searching for a game on the computer), I asked Sangmin if he recognized the characters on my desktop.

He paused for a moment, working on his pronunciation. Then he replied, “Doctor Who!”

I was so glad he knew! After all, “Doctor Who” is a British television show, and I was surprised a Korean was familiar with it. But we did notice something weirdly wrong about the desktop.

The characters didn’t have faces.

Don’t ask me why they don’t have faces. I suppose the picture was made in an artistic sense (You know how some artists draw people without faces? Nevermind…). Nevertheless, it did puzzle us.

So Sangmin decided to fix it. He grabbed my computer and screenshot the desktop. He opened up Paint and worked some magic. I decided to add my own touch to the picture as well. The three of us had a good laugh throughout the artistic process. The end result looked like this:

There you go. The Doctor, his companion Amy Pond, a Pokéball and Pikachu. Worlds collide. It’s beautiful.

We had a great time losing our minds for about an hour or so, talking, laughing and recreating a picture of Doctor Who. Every time I meet with Sangmin, a young man from a different country with a different background and speaking a different language, the same theme rings true—we are all the same. Whether you are from Korea, the Philippines, or the United States, we all need Mind-Losing Time once in a while.