Recap:
Hello friends! It's been a long time since my last (and I really thought it would be my last) post and a lot has happened since then: Prince died, several of you got married, Ben picked Lauren, and the Avengers defeated Ultron and put a stop to his dastardly plan. As for my life, I'm sure everyone reading this is pretty caught up on the basics, but I'll recap for context's sake and because it makes my life sound more interesting than it's actually been over the last eleven months of working all the time.
After returning from Korea for Match Day after my five weeks' stay, I then went to stay with Brandan in Tubingen, Germany where I would base my forays into Europe for the following few weeks.
Barcelona and Andorra (it's a real place! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorra) with Brandan,
serendipitously stumbled across Delirium tap house in Brussels (a good story for another time),
almost got shanked by the dirty Rasta DJ from Zoolander in Amsterdam during the Dutch Tulip festival (another good story for a different time, though the cat's out of the bag now thanks to one Brandan Walters),
and shared Germany's best beer with two of America's best gentlemen in Munich at Andech's Abbey.
I had never been to Europe before and always wanted to go, so thus passed my second big trip last year.
Then to celebrate medical school graduation, a group from my class capped off the experience with a trip to Thailand and Hong Kong where we ate some of the best food I've ever tasted, dove the technicolor reefs of the Andaman Sea, and I was carded for admission to a 16 years and older videogame arcade.
And there, boys and girls and non-gender-binary individuals, are where my travels and my bank account ended. Since then, I'm afraid that the only place I've traveled is through the dark, cold, and decidedly unscenic land of despair known as adulthood (read: intern year of Med-Peds residency at U of M), where all the beds have MRSA, the food is only good on Saturdays (Kosmo bulgogi and Ginger Deli pho/bahn mi, amirite?), and the drinks are usually enjoyed alone, and sometimes in the shower when you're tired. Okay, I'm being dramatic, but you get the picture: Lots of work; Mark not good at adulting.
Anyway, after my seminal trip to South Korea last year, I had no concrete plans to come back, though I knew it would happen eventually. We get a two-week vacation block during intern year though--mine in June--and as no other plans had crystallized by winter, I started toying with the idea of using it to go back to Korea. I then received a well-timed email from InKAS (International Korean Adoptee Service)--one of those adoptee organizations from last time--with news that they were offering a summer trip to eight cities across Korea in, you guessed it, just about the exact window of my vacation in June; so I applied, was accepted, they paid for my plane ticket, and here I am.
Thus, this and any potential subsequent blog posts are really more bonus entries than anything, as I'm pretty much just here to visit friends and explore a bit more. All major plot arcs from my original trip are either completed or suspended for now and this trip, much like any other poorly thought-out sequel, has less than half the budget of the original, will likely feature many of the same jokes, have inferior stories (seriously, how am I ever going to top naked jjimjilbang ER? I'm not.), and many of the original characters will not be returning on this go-round :(.
That said, the trip is already off to a great start, I'll almost certainly be back again in the future, and I like the idea of maintaining this blog longitudinally, so welcome to Chapter 2!
Tattoo Story:
So after my very formative experience here last year, it was clear that Korea and a Korean identity were going to be a permanent part of my life moving forward, and somewhere along the line of my time here, I decided I wanted to do something as both a commemoration and a reminder of that deliberate and ongoing decision.
Ironically, I first got the idea from an InKAS member I met who had horrifyingly gotten her adoption case number tattooed on her forearm, in allusion to a concentration camp ID number tattooed on a Jewish prisoner during WW2. Yeah, fucking yikes.
Now I had never been a tattoo person and was neither planning on or even curious about getting one before Korea, and as drastic and upsettingly negative as this person's tattoo was (you can read my post "An Adoption Story" from last year if you need more context for why some people legitimately feel this way), obviously the image of that tattoo stuck with me, but eventually, I thought more and more about co-opting it into a positive reminder. I brought it up with Peter, Grace, and the rest of my housemates after ruminating on the idea for a while, and they were all very supportive. There was only one problem: tattoos are illegal and largely unavailable in Korea due to their association with the Korean mob, Japanese Yakuza, and other organized crime groups in East Asia. So no tattoo in Korea for me.
Nonetheless, this gave me some more time to think about exactly what I wanted and where I wanted it. I ended up having to wait until after my Europe trip, but once I was back, I went to Name Brand Tattoo in Ann Arbor with Peter, who helped me pick a cool font and made sure I spelled my own name right, and Jenny, who mostly just wanted to see if I cried. I decided on getting my Korean name "오진규" (Oh Jin Kyu) because it represents my Korean identity and serves as a reminder to continue learning more about Korean language and culture and I got it on my right bicep because I wanted it to be somewhere where I could easily see it, but also cover it up if I needed too. (Now as it turns out, scrub sleeves are super short and fall adorably, drastically short of covering it up, but my residency program director thinks it's cool and it's permanently on my arm there forever, so tough shit, workplace professionalism.) Here is some photodocumentation from Jenny's secret facebook album.
Let's be honest the shaving of arm hairs was 99% formality for tattoo artist Nick.
"Are you crying yet?" - supportive friend Jenny
And the finished product in all of its angry, semi-painful-but-not-crying, definitely not in fact hidden by most short sleeves, not mispelled glory.
Now I didn't tell my family about this until it was already done, mostly just because I didn't think to, so I, in my infinite wisdom, chose to call them up the night before they were going to come up to Ann Arbor for the Auscultations a cappella Spring Concert and tell them, "Hey, by the way, I have pretty big news to tell you when you come up tomorrow--I've been thinking about it for a while and I'm not sure how you're going to react to it bye!" At the time, that seemed like a completely reasonable way to preface this news, but as it turns out, that is incorrect. So Stephanie called me back about fifteen minutes later slightly panicked and said, "Mark, what did you do!? Mom and dad said you did something, but you won't tell them what it is--they are freaking out!" I told them not to worry about it and that I would see them the next day at the concert.
Now I had anticipated their reactions and guessed that my mom would love it, my sister would look at it really closely for a few seconds, say "Ooooo," and then continue on living her life, and I thought my dad might be kind of mad about it, but I wasn't sure. To commute their suffering, as soon as they showed up at the concert the next day, I told them right away that I got a tattoo and showed them and I was right about my mom and sister's reactions, but pretty off about my dad's. Because, you see, shortly after this big reveal and a couple more spell checks later, my dad did this:
It's my and Stephanie's Korean names with a large script C (for Cheryl) around them, of my dad's own design. It actually says "bravest cheese, yes we go," but don't tell him that--jkjk.
And then a few months after that, he did this:
to celebrate his Polish heritage and in remembrance of my grandfather Ralph Sr., who passed away last year.
And THEN, he did this:
Okay not really, but I'm keeping it in mind--the man is hard to shop for at Christmas time. But let's go back for a second and talk about what my parents, in their stress-plosion of parental anxiety sparked off my by ambiguous and poorly thought-out comment, thought that I had actually done, and more importantly, what this might reveal about their innermost perceptions of their son.
Me: "So what did you guys think I did yesterday before I told you?"
Mom: "We didn't know--I mostly thought that you had a new girlfriend or that you won an award or something."
Dad: "I don't know; I was worried you dropped out of med school or something."
Steph: "Yup, he was freaking out."
Mom: "I tried to tell your father that you--"
Steph: "--Dad thought you were going to become a priest!"
End scene.
