naolina.darielle.vanharlem. - district three- fin.
Jan 3, 2012 4:20:08 GMT -5
Post by glitter . on Jan 3, 2012 4:20:08 GMT -5
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Mr. Sandman's showing his beam
When he walks into the room the walls lean to listen
Surf out, blank waves click bath and forth
Like old headlights, sniffing model glue again
Head like a steel trap, wishing I didn't
I don't. Just want to be a footnote
In someone elses happiness. [/size][/color]
When I look in the mirror, I’m not sure I like what I see. Sure, I have decent features, but the fact that the garish looks that my mother has plastered onto me just make me look unnatural and somewhat strained in my appearances. I much prefer the natural look I do possess, but I’d rather not cross my mother and her intentions to get me married to some capitolite by winning a district three beauty contest of sorts. So I go along with her eccentric little things she does to my looks and allow her to dress me up as I usually look on Saturday afternoons.
My most natural you could find me at would probably be on a Monday morning, in which my short, thin hair is usually in its flat-as-flat-can-be stage. It just hangs limply, unable to do anything with it unless you take time and effort and extensions, things that I’d rather not do for myself when I’m not forced by my mother. But my hair when not exposed to these horrible things, as I’ve said, is limp and flat and rather unappealing. It’s cut short so it can be hid in wigs and so it can stay healthy through bleaching and curling and teasing. It’s thinness makes it get greasy very quickly, which I find irritating and somewhat uncomfortable when I cannot shower.
And my natural features aren’t as painted over or glossed as you’d see when my mother gets a hold of me. Naturally, I guess I’d say I’m kind of… Elfish looking. Not in the way that I have pointed ears and am going to go to the north pole to hammer down toys for everybody, but more so in the way that I have small features that are too long to be considered mouse-like. My nose is rather long, but it’s thin and perk at the same time, and I assume it’s a feature that I find attractive on myself. My cheekbones are rather high and it makes my face look thinner than most peoples in the world, giving me the impression of a somewhat oval face shape. My lips aren’t the largest, but they’re not small either, and are usually chapped to some degree because of the districts drastic temperature changes.
When my eyes aren’t coated with mascara and being covered with contact lenses, I usually wear, of all things, glasses. I don’t have terrible eyesight, I presume, I’m just a tad nearsighted. My eyes are a strange mix of hazel and brown, and it seems to change between the two depending on what I’m wearing. Reds and corals and oranges tend to bring the hazel out more, which I think is a good thing, since I do enjoy donning those colors. My eye shape isn’t large, but they’re quite prominent on my facial structure. Probably due to them being slightly slanted and almost cat-like. I know, I’m describing my features too much as things that have nothing to do with me, but it’s not my fault that I do have these resemblances. My eyes have decent eyelashes, I presume. Maybe that’s where all my hair went, away from my head and towards my eyelashes.
I find my height to be something that is quite awkward. I’m not tall-tall in the way that I’m 6’ 2’’ and towering over the other women or girls in my district, but I’m not the same 5’ 6’’ that most people who are my age and gender are. I believe I stand at about 5’ 9’’, which translates to the fact that I am tall for someone who is a female, and I don’t mind it, really. It was fun being picked in athletics during school first. Yes, even district three requires us exercise in schools, it’s just considerably less than the lower districts may be. I’m rather thin as well. I’m not talking stick thin, because I’m not some emaciated opium addict in district one who models and has emotional breakdowns and bulimia and all that. I’m more of the “Let the metabolism take care of it” type of thin, which means that most of my body weight is in my thighs, but the rest of me is lean. Of course, when I’m older, this will fade and send me into a spiral of sadness, but for now, I’ll take what I can get.
Out of costume, the clothing I prefer consists of little things. Like jeans or shorts. Sometimes paired with sneakers, sometimes with those little ballet flats that is maybe the only thing that my mother lets me wear outside of competitions that is worth some value of money. In the eyes of my mother, anything outside of media events doesn’t matter. The shirts I wear are usually white tee shirts with a jacket of some kind over it. I like my purple one especially, but that could just be me.
But the minute my mother gets a hold of me, something else happens. My hair has extentions braided into it, and those extentions are bleached, curled, pinned, sprayed and waved to a crisp, making sure that it looks as dramatic and explosive as possible. I hate it and it makes my head look like I have a Yorkshire terrier occupying it. And then the tiara that lays upon the top of my head during this unfortunate violation of having decent hair. A feather and faux-diamond tiara that I wish my mother would deem tacky and remove from my head. But she never does. It’s uncomfortable. To match the grand tiara, there is a selection of overly sequined dresses and a faux fur cape. It’s disgusting.
The makeup that’s done on my face during the competitions is rather over the top. Not in the way that is a good thing, but more to the fact that I could pass for bambi with the white spots that are drawn onto my cheeks. Too much eyeliner and the most disgusting color of lip color accompanies this, and I absolutely hate it.
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Tempest in a teacup, get unique
And peroxide princess shine like shark teeth
What if it's a sign, what if it's a sign?
What if you peaked early?
And does your husband know the way
the sunshine gleams from your wedding band?
Does he know the way, does he know the way?
That the crickets convince me to call it a night?[/size][/color]
I’m not my mother, and I don’t believe I will ever be. Because I’m not an idea person. I can’t take initiative and do something by myself. Honestly, it’s probably the worst trait I could’ve acquired in my lifetime. I don’t have a spine and I don’t know how to do anything by myself. I’ve had so many things made up for me in my life that nobody has ever given me an option to do anything or say anything that I’d like to do. It’s tragic that I can just sit there like an inanimate object when my mother is fussing over what I will be doing with my life when I’m older, and I guess I’ve just given up and let everybody else take the wheel. I want to do things by myself, but it’s something that I can’t do. I physically and mentally can’t do something by myself because of how I was raised. I was raised like I was a toddler up until now, in which I am not a toddler, instead I am an inanimate object my mother can mold into perfection. Which means that I can’t form ideas that are going to get me anywhere in life.
I’m a plastic Barbie doll. No, I’m not kidding you. I’m dressed up every Saturday night from the times of 5:30 in the evening to 2:00 the following morning, in which I fall asleep half-garbed and wake up uncoherent of what happened the night before. My mother believes that I need to have personal appearances in district three, so every single weekend I’m subjected to being a “Carousel Princess” one of many girls who basically compete in beauty contests in the third district if their social status is high enough. It’s a rather pathetic thing, but it’s a tradition that district three has, and my mother was once the person who was at the top of her game in it, almost being able to marry into the elite capitol statuses by winning a certain amount of these competitions, but when she broke her leg… She relies on me now. To win everything. So she dresses me up and takes painstakingly long amounts of time to preen me until I look like what I view as a freak show.
Despite my complete incapability to form any idea on what I should do for my own, I like to think I’m good at describing things. I have a rather vast vocabulary and like painting pictures with words. No, I’m not a storytellerlike Estelle or whoever that weird girl in the 56th hunger games was, but I am somebody who can put images into people’s heads. I don’t know, I like describing the things I see because I really have no control over them, so I can’t change them, and if somebody else does I can adjust my thoughts accordingly. I don’t have quite the emotional charm of that aspect of description, but I do like to think that I have the ideas and visuals very straight forward when I talk.
Though, I’ve been told I’m repetitive. I do think I say the same things over and over, always trying to perfect the things that I’d been saying. If I can’t find the right wording for something, I’ll repeat it until it does find the right words. For example “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t, I don’t.” If I can’t find the right way to say I didn’t, I’ll repeat it despite the fact that it sounds wrong until it finally sounds right and I can tack another word to the end of it. I also like finding the right wordings and repeating them since they seem so pretty and rough. It’s a quirk, I guess, but it’s something I enjoy doing.
I think the one thing that I’m ever verbal about is probably the fact that I need to be on time for everything. Every single thing I do, I have to have a time and date for it, or I’ll feel like a failure and just sit there in my own anguish and wonder why I was such a failure to the human species. I love calenders and feel the need to plan every single move that I make. It’s the only thing that seems to matter to me, or at least in my mother’s eyes.
The thing is, I don’t want to end up like my father. I want to be the anti of what my father is. My father is a pushover, somebody who throws himself into a project wholeheartedly and does whatever he is told. He’s somebody who doesn’t mind being steamrolled because it’s simply something that my father is. I never want to end up like him. But somehow, I’m convinced that behind my back…. I already am.
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I will never end up like him.
But behind my back, I already am, keep a calender
this way you will always know.
The last time you came through, oh darling
I know what you're going through
the last time you came through,
Oh, darling. I know what you're going through.[/size][/color][/justify]
Iris and Jacoby Nepster weren’t the wealthiest people in district one. But they were fairly intelligent and seemed to have the mind of people who belonged in district three. People who could work with their minds for the advantage of the capitol, and when they proposed the idea of beautifying cameras to the capitol, to make the angles of the blood and gore in the hunger games sharper and more graphic. All in all, the capitol loved the idea and concept, and gave them permission to pack up their bags and move to the crowded streets of district three so they could supervise the production and such of the said cameras. During this time in the district, their daughter, Britta Nepster, was becoming a reluctant something of a socialite. No, the social classes weren’t like in district one where everybody had wealth. But here, everybody could compete in the idea that popularity among peers would spread without wealth or gain. It was all based on wits, and somewhat on looks. And thankfully, Britta Nepster had both of those.[/color][/blockquote]
So she went out, and with the money that she earned from working in the computer labs, managing the keyboards and mouses. In which, she met the kid that would ultimately change her life forever. Oliver Van Harlem was pretty much the most socially awkward kid you could ever meet, and he was one half of the largest computer mouse manufacturing megahouse that was Terrgon Mouses. All in all, he was going to have power someday, somehow, so Britta, being the nasty person she was, started to talk to the socially awkward child with fluttering eyelashes and pretty much snapped her gum like there was no tomorrow. They were close enough, she figured, that she may get a fraction of the figure of money he was set up to inherit when his father died. It was a simple equation that she set up in her head, and she figured it was quite plausible.
So, when an accident took out Oliver’s father sometime during this deep and tragic history, when Oliver received one half of the inheritance, he was quite happy with the meager sum he got. It wasn’t a lot by capitol standards, but it could easily supply a district three family for generations. And despite Oliver becoming considerably more handsome and attractive over the years between meeting Britta and having his inheritance supplied to him, he still didn’t give up on his childhood dreams. He built a carousel on a small piece of land that was meant to be a recreational park. All in all, it was possibly the stupidest thing he could do with the money he had, and it went down as the stupidest thing somebody ever had done. Period.
In which, Mr. Van Harlem still had a good amount of money left, and was making pennies here and there because children would pay to ride the said carousel. And which Britta decided that the social classes needed a little bit more… shake to them. Now that people seemed to be less so obsessed with the fact that socialites were in place now that they were older, she went to Oliver and inquired about having something to divide the people of the district. By beauty and hard work. It was a beauty contest. In which he agreed to, and she won continuously. Pretty soon, capitol men were inquiring about the beauty queens and decided if somebody won a certain amount, they’d belong in the capitol where the other pretty people were. But to no prevail, two contests from being swept away on her feet by a capitolite she broke her leg. And had to “Settle” for Oliver, who was now gradually becoming richer with every carousel ride.
Britta aspired for children. She wanted a girl in particular, so her daughter could live out the fame that she never achieved. So the couple had kids. And the first one was obviously the wrong gender for her, and he turned out to be the older brother, deemed Genaro by his father because, honestly. Britta really didn’t care about her son if it was a boy, she only cared if she would get her prize-winning daughter. And a year and a half or so later, the wish she had wanted had come: Naolina herself. The name was chosen out of the air, and didn’t have much thought put into it either.
You could say the childhood years were rather boring, and you’d probably be right. The media queen known as Britta went around the district with a smile on her face and her two kids, always making sure that they were socializing with the right people and making sure that the two kids believed they were superior to run-of-the-mill lab rats. It was the way that their mother thought, and while it wasn’t a good thing, it made Britta feel better about herself. And it made Genaro’s happiness spike, and gave him the confidence that he possesses.
But by the time she was thirteen years old, Naolina was being preened and groomed to seemingly insanity. And she wanted out of it, and at the same time, her brother was starting a mail order anthrax business, in which she wished that she had part in. But no. She couldn’t have a spare moment to herself because of her mother. And that’s when Naolina noticed she was like her father. A pushover.