This is the dark, despressed side of Eric Arthur Lundin.  If you want to know what makes me tick, then you will never get the whole picture without reading this.
. . . If you do decide to read, please read to the very end.

The longest my family has stayed in one place was during our five years in Tokyo when my Dad worked at the embassy.  The move to Tokyo from Yokohama was personally catastrophic for me, because I my best friend was still in Yokohama and I had only known him for my fourth grade year.  His father was in the military and they had to leave shortly after we moved to Tokyo.

The transition was difficult.  My new school, Nishimachi International School, was about as different as it could possibly be from Byrrd (sp?) Elementary School at Negishi Naval Base, where I went to school in Yokohama.  Whereas Byrrd had been essentially no different from a typical American school except for the fact that it was in a different country, Nishimachi was a private school (K-9) with a very large (English-speaking) Japanese student population, not to mention kids from all sorts of other countries.  I guess it was the culture shock that got me--no one there was really American.  No one was especially interested in the things that I liked.  Everyone was in some way "Japanized," which  made sense, but whereas I had been living in Japan for a year by then, I had never had much exposure to Japanese culture on a personal basis.

Suddenly the focus was on things I'd never paid attention to, especially basketball, which was almost the only thing we could do during recess.  I'd almost never played basketball in my life, hardly even in P.E., as far as I could remember.  Now at NIS, it was a required social skill.  I had no interest in it, and virtually never played.  I dreaded basketball classes in P.E. and they were the source of much embarrassment.  I generally stopped liking P.E. after 4th grade.

I also still played with toys--I was very fond of Legos and Micro Machines, and continued to be even through 9th grade.  At NIS I discovered that such hobbies were "uncool" and childish.  What was I to do?

On top of all this, I had the misfortune of becoming an extremely avid Star Trek fan during Junior High.  As I have said many times before, Tokyo is a horrible place for a Trekkie.  For one thing, hardly any Japanese know what Star Trek is and they'll just as soon assume you said "Star Wars" as ask you to enlighten them.

I really didn't make any great friends.  It wasn't until the last two years of our stay in Toyko that I started to find a place for myself, but even then...

My parents got to watch as their only son went from quite happy to relatively "melancholy," as my mom put it once.

I don't seem to have quite emerged from this state.

We moved back to Arlington, VA, for my tenth grade year which I spent at Yorktown High School.  To keep a long story short, while I made at least two good friends quite early on (Brian, Jason), neither was in my grade, and I felt somewhat out of place until towards the end of the year when I started doing stuff with Ryan and Chris.

Of course, we had to leave.  Our next stop was Honolulu, HI, where my parents live to this day.  My first year there was one of my worst, socially.  For me, Punahou School, another private school, was a desert.  There was no way to break into the various cliques, and none of them especially appealed to me anyway.  I did meet Orian, who is an extremely good friend, but probably the first time I formally met him was at graduation, and then I wouldn't have known him at all if Evan hadn't invited me to go along with what is now called the Legion on a movie outing.

I never quite achieved in my two years at Punahou what had taken me a year to achieve in Yorktown, and subsequently I had my eyes set on the future.
 
 

R E Q U I E M   F O R   A   D R E A M

The view from 101 Emmet, or, as I called it, "Emmet 101."  The name would become tragically appropriate.
 

College was the future.  To me, UVA was to be my salvation.  I had heard the stories, as had all high school students, of how wonderful college life was.  UVA was my big chance, my personal revolution--at UVA, I would never feel lonely or depressed again.  At UVA, the tables would turn.

It was not to be.  Several factors came together that stifled my hopes.  In my enthusiasm to quickly build as large and diverse a group of friends as possible, I neglected my own neighbors.  In fact, not only did I miss the boat at home, but very few of the other people who I was trying to "gather together" demonstrated any interest, and indeed they appeared to be doing the precise opposite of me: they focused on making friends with their neighbors.

Another factor that I often cite was my physical location in my hall.  I was at the end of the building, across from the stairwell, with only two neighboring rooms, the residents of which all smoke and drank heavily.  My own roommate, Yi, was an extremely studious and disciplined Asian whose mannerisms seemed to annoy me constantly.  My aversion from him also extended to his race, in an odd way--I was determined to make myself as international as possible, and as my most predominant race is Asian, Chinese-Taiwanese specifically, his being Asian simply tormented me more.  To Yi's credit, I definitely underrated him--he is truly a cool guy.

Far from being the magic solution to all my problems, my first semester at UVA just extended them, and it even made them worse.  What really hammered it in for me was the simple act of eating.  For me, there was no greater humiliation than eating alone all the time.  Getting dinner was always the low point of my day; I would have to walk, by myself, down the gauntlet--past all of my hallmates' rooms--to and from dinner all the time.  If I got take-out, I bore the added humiliation of walking back past them all with a take-out carton and cup.  Eating at the dining hall was at least as torturous, because as far as I could tell almost nobody else ate by themselves after the first six weeks or so.

It was towards the end of my first semester that I became afflicted by a horrendous case of acne.  My official line was that my engineering classes were stressful, but the blatant truth was that the blemishes, I believe, were just a physical manifestation of my personal misery.  Most people probably didn't quite believe my offical line anyway--those who knew me at the beginning of the semester remembered that I had a clear face.

The acne is gone, but I still have the scars.  They will probably never go away.  (Sometimes I even think they look cool.)

First semester ended, and things gradually improved in the second.  Probably what saved me was the work--my U.S.-Russian Relations class assigned mountains of reading--which kept me from poring over my social situation and feeling too sorry for myself.  Work aside, I did make some good friends, and things were looking up again.
 

One day as I was surfing online, at one of my favorite websites, rottentomatoes.com (or "RT" for short, a movie rating site), I noticed an online poll about which of three movie posters looked the coolest.  One of these was Requiem for a Dream.  I personally thought the poster for "O' Brother, Where Art Thou" was the best, but Requiem got the most votes.  (It was also said to be a better movie.)    After finding out what "requiem" meant, I decided the title fit my predicament perfectly, and I fell in love with the poster without ever seeing the movie (I finally saw it in early September 2001).  I also discovered that the poster was sold out, but I managed to get a copy after a month or so.

The big eye on the poster reflected off of a mirror on the opposite wall in my room out to the hallway when the door was open, so attentive passersby would be greeted for an instant by this great big blue eye as they walked towards the stairwell.  This gave me a mild and secretive, and probably slightly sadistic, sense of satisfaction.
 
 

Today, in my second year at UVA, I am more content and secure (socially) than I have ever been before.  Strangely, though I'm definitely no social juggernaut, I have managed to find a great sense of satisfaction in my life.  To be sure, I am still hit by occassional spells of depression, but now I usually enjoy the time I spend on my own.  I also almost never have to eat alone.

A better person would have surmounted the challenges I faced without a lot of difficulty, and many people probably have.  I mean, I'm definitely not the only Foreign Service kid around here.  A better person probably wouldn't dwell on the past so much as I have, but it doesn't seem to be something I can do much about.  Frankly, I'm happy enough to have escaped with relatively intact grades.

I have probably exaggerated my past social circumstances in this writing, but it wouldn't be by much.  Looking back on it all, I am struck by the resemblance of what I have gone through to the experience of a developing country.  It's an odd analogy, but it seems to work, especially with regard to my first semester of college.  Like the revolutions that swept through the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s, UVA brought me endless hope.  After UVA, it seemed, everything would be different.

Also like the Third World revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, the hope proved to be ill-founded.  If there was one thing I learned in Emmet 101, it was that all progress first induces suffering before it brings rewards.  The Third World is still coming to grips with this, having learned the lessons of socialism.

Now I have begun to experience some of the "rewards."  Improvement in my social circumstances comes slowly, like economic improvement in the developing world, and I view myself as constantly struggling in unfair conditions to achieve betterment.  If there's another thing that I learned in Emmet 101, it was:  Never give up.
 

The battle continues.