Stokely James District 5
Sept 15, 2012 10:13:01 GMT -5
Post by heartwood on Sept 15, 2012 10:13:01 GMT -5
2913
Attractiveness is completely relative; it’s hard to imagine anything being attractive these days. The air is completely enveloped in some thick layer of smog that makes it hard for everyone to breath; so how can anyone be super attractive if their simply just coughing all the time. I’m not saying I have a cough, hell, I’m young and fit; I do all my physical activity indoors so that the poison doesn’t seep into my lungs. I’m not entirely sure that’s really how it works; but then again, what does it really matter? We’re doomed to a tragic fate no matter how you spin it.
My skin is fairly dark. I’m not talking covered in soot or oil dark; I’m talking a naturally healthy glow, a tan or brown, I don’t know. It seems to work out whenever I want to mingle with the ladies; it’s a good starting point. Not many other people in the district have my skin color. My eyes are a light brown, almost a perfect contrast to the darkness of my skin. Every year I see people marvel at the beauty of the tributes from district one, but I don’t see anything too special. Sure, blue eyes are absolutely fascinating, but my light brown eyes shouldn’t be any less heralded right? It’s only genetics.
I like to switch up my hairstyles pretty frequently. Once, I had it long and straight, it fell down to my waist, but my face is so smooth and babyish that I had a few people tell me I looked like a girl. That’s when I started to grow out my facial hair. I always maintain a thin mustache; it’s so close to my face that it actually looks like someone drew fake hair on my upper lip. My facial hair is a bit darker than the hair on top of my head, I don’t know why it works out that way, it just does. I grow hair faster than a lot of the lighter-skinned kids in my district. Funny how that works out isn’t it? Others with my skin color have the same issue, but then you get to the darkest of the dark, and their hair grows no faster than the whitest of the white. Sometimes I wish I were born in the Capitol…or even district three…maybe even district six so that I had the opportunity to research these sorts of things through technology or medicine. But alas, I’m doomed to oil.
Ok, back to my hair. I don’t really sport the long hair too much anymore. It’s way too much grease patrol and maintenance. Plus, working in the refinery like I do, it tends to get extremely dirty…and I like my cleanliness. There’s an old saying that has outlasted the wars, it’s so old, I don’t think anyone in all of Panem can remember where it originated, not even those who live in the Capitol. I think it goes something like, “cleanliness is close to godliness.” I’m sure the Careers would disagree. They think brutality and warriorness is close to godliness. And maybe in this world it is. Panem’s a brutal place, and while I’m glad I’m not living in a farming district or something like that; district five is hardly any better.
I keep going off on a tangent, don’t I? My hair. Now I just wear it in some kind of bowl shape, or I cut it and let it fly forward on it’s own. It’s a very typical hairstyle, but when I wear my bowl cut I like to dress a little bit more fashionably than normal. While most of my clothing is covered in grease stains, oil, and soot; I like to dress nicely on some occasion. It always pays to have good clothes; I consider myself a bit of a shopper. I love the way my skin looks in contrast so some of the darker greens and purples. I look at myself in the mirror, and sometimes I feel like I have my own personal stylists like the tributes at the Parade. But of course, I don’t. It’s just my mom and me living at home, but she’ll get me pretty much any article of clothing I want. She’s good at that sort of thing.
My body is a weird thing. No matter how much I work out, no matter how long I run or how much weight I find myself lifting; I can never seem to get in the shape that I see these Career tributes in during the Games. It’s absolutely amazing. Their bodies are sculpted to such perfection; and I know it’s not just to be more athletic. They all have trainers and advisors; they know the exact science of body sculpting. The more fit and attractive you look to the sponsors, the more money they’ll give you. It’s a simple math equation. Toss in a bunch of numbers concerning reps, weight, miles, hours working out…you know what I’m getting at, its probably something they’ve perfected over the years. Here in this district, we just have to work with what we’ve got. And that’s just not that much.
Ok, back to my body. I’m not the biggest person, but I’m nowhere near the smallest either. Maybe my diet has to do with why my body looks the way it does. It’s pretty flabby, but not fat. It just seems to me like there’s almost nothing I can do to lose it. I lose weight, sure, but those pockets of fat just manage to stay attached to my body. It’s absolutely annoying. But I make up for it in loose clothing, beautiful skin, and a positive attitude.
Oh yea, and how could I forget about my feet? My feet are absolutely gigantic. I have to find custom-made shoes, because the shoe stores can’t turn a profit on making shoes my size. Which size? Size eighteen. Yes. I’m only six feet tall, but my shoes are like mini boats. My friends have always joked if we were ever stranded out at sea, that we could just grab onto my shoes and they would float us to safety. It’s a stupid joke, because honestly, when will we ever have the freedom to go out to see?
--
Ok so, now we’re going to talk about my personality right? Isn’t that a weird question to ask somebody? Haven’t you ever been in a classroom, and they always ask you, “Okay everyone, you’re going to tell us your name, and three interesting things about yourself,” or maybe they’ll ask you, “three words to describe you, and why?” Do you understand how hard it is to describe yourself in only three words? I have sixteen years of life experience and a butt load of self-reflection and introspection, and you expect to figure out what kind of person I am by knowing three facts or three adjectives? That’s utterly ridiculous to me. But I guess I might as well try. Lets start with the facts.
I like to think outside the box. That’s always the first thing I say, but it doesn’t really say enough about me, does it? If I heard someone else say that, I’d start engaging myself in some sort of internal debate on what they actually meant by that. Are they creative? Are they intelligent? Do they manage to get things done through an array of unorthodox methods that seem unusual and sometimes insane to other people? Or do they think by saying that they think outside the box, that every wrong answer they give in class will be thought of as just that person’s interesting way of thinking? Me? All of those imply.
School is hard for most kids nowadays. There’s no money to afford private tutors or high quality textbooks; everything is so career-oriented…or I guess I should say job oriented when considering the setting that we’re in…it’s just hard to learn anything that won’t make you money. On top of that, why WOULD anyone want to learn anything that wouldn’t make you any money? It just doesn’t make sense. Humans are objects of functionality; they take in any and all information that would help them survive the longest, and use it to their advantage, disregarding anything that might be considered useless or ancillary knowledge. Not me though. I like to think outside the box. I guess that brings me to the three adjectives, and how this fact related to them. Am I creative, am I intelligent, or do I just hate to be looked at as a guy who gets things wrong. At this point, it’s hard to say I’m not all of those things. For now, the word will be outside the box. I know its not one word, but hell people, I’m thinking outside the damn box!
Ok so, onto the second fact. I feel like I was born in the wrong district. Now, it doesn’t take an absolute genius like me to figure out just how unfair this social and economic caste system is in Panem. People are born into their jobs, born into a sequence of events that is virtually unchangeable, especially in the lower districts; and the only escape is either death, or a roulette in which the entirety of our nation and the Gamesmakers control your fate. I would love just once to see the college of district six, where intellectuals such as myself go to improve their areas of expertise. Here in disrict five, I don’t even know what my area of expertise is. Because I work in a refinery…a decent, hardworking job…but it just doesn’t stimulate the mind like I want it to.
But like I said before, it could be way worse. My family is by no means starving; we might spend almost each and every day working our hearts out, but we don’t have to take tesserae as often as those in the lower districts. The slums of district five are bad enough, I can only imagine what it looks like in eleven or twelve. Every year when the victory tour is held, the tributes always seem to have spent the least time in those districts; I imagine it must be for a reason. So, I guess it’s time to get to that second adjective isn’t it. Why don’t we go with…misplace. Yea, misplaced works. I should be in one place, but I’m actually in this place. And this place sucks.
So, now onto our third and final tidbit of information. I always like to create some sort of theme for my though process. I figure since we’re doing threes, I can split it up that way too. Creativity is a spiritual thing, isn’t it? I remember hearing once that people who train in the martial arts tend to split things in to the mind, body, and heart. But where does creativity fit? Isn’t it a blend of heart and mind? Being born in the wrong district is a physical thing, so I can just cross that off right now; and being that I rambled on about my level of intelligence, it’s hard to see that “out of the box” adjective not fall into the mind category. Now that I think about it, the preceding “I think” before the “out of the box” should have been a dead give away.
So what does that leave? The heart. A funny thing, the heart. People always attribute the heart to the feeling of love, but really, isn’t that more of a mind thing? You’re always thinking about a specific person; you notice every little thing they do, and every-time you’re apart your mind races when you think about what they might be doing. The powerful emotions of jealously and envy are invoked by the mind, not the heart. The heart just keeps your blood pumping, and keeps you alive. But for dissection purposes, I guess it’s best to stay along the themes of love.
Love hasn’t been easy for me. I don’t get easily attached to any one person; I get attached to ideas and thoughts. Of course like any other teenage boy I have physical urges that I need satisfied; that’s never been entirely difficult. But love. A metaphysical attraction to another human being has never seemed logical to me. Codependence is too risky to make a reality; but it’s not like I don’t seek companionship. Women are always asking me to commit, as if I’m going to run away if the word “boyfriend” isn’t written on my forehead. I just don’t understand it, is all. So, the third and final word to describe my personality…lets go with…unloving.
Outside of the box, misplaced, and unloving. Those words together seem rather overdramatic and depressing, don’t they? But they’re not. I’m content with who I am, I’m just not content with where I am. I never have been. I guess that’s the point to which we’ll get to my history. But where to start?
The beginning, of course. My parents met in the refinery I work at today; my mom was a beautiful young woman with skin even darker than mine and hair even longer than mine had ever been. It’s weird comparing myself to my mother, because we are vastly different people. But my father…people tell me I’m so much like my father. I look like a darker, stouter version of him, and they say he was one of the smartest men they’d ever known. And yes, like any other unfortunate bastard, I wish I had known him. It’s not something that haunts my dreams at night, but it’s certainly something that’s had an impact on the man I am today. Before his death, he was too vocal against the Capitol. He wanted change, and he tried to inspire others to seize that change with him. People are cowardly creatures. One by one, people are weak. But together, people can be strong…I just know it. But Panem has been so broken down and battered I just don’t see that happening. We’ll need a leader, a strong one. My dad wasn’t charismatic enough; he had the ideas, he just went about the execution wrong. Until his execution went right. Irony puts a bitter taste in my mouth sometimes.
My birth was nothing extraordinary. I was a normally sized boy throughout my entire childhood. I had friends, and I had enemies. I had love interests and I had gotten into fights. Everything in my childhood had been utterly typical and amazingly uninteresting. But one thing I had developed over the years is a fondness for information. It always amazed me how in the Capitol, resources and information were available by the literal click of a button; here, it’s very difficult to get information from one end of the district to the next. It didn’t take me too long to figure out how much of an advantage that gave them over us if a rebellion broke out. How lucky they are.
My mother is the only family I have now. We both work in the refinery, just building upon the stockpiled resources that the Capitol has. It’s not fulfilling work, but someone has to make money to survive, and we’d rather not take our chances with putting me in line for the hunger games. Oh right, I guess that’s the another thing I’ll talk about right? The Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games have always been fascinating, especially the way your views change about them as you grow older. As a young boy, I love the action involved. I didn’t know any better. The deaths were violent and bloody, people died in the most poetic ways; even those I knew from district five who had died in the games had died in ways that made the whole thing seem entirely fake. But it wasn’t.
I would like to think of a time where kids loved to have birthdays. Where parties were thrown in honor of a child getting older, where people ate cake and pastries, where they played games and sang joyous songs. It’s hard to think a period like that existed in our history; now, birthdays are simply frightening. I remember when I turned twelve, and I remember my first reaping. I had my best clothes on; almost like I was dressing for my own funeral. Sally Hopkins and Jimmy Teever were chosen…both of them died in the bloodbath. Sally had her head chopped clean off by a sword…Jimmy was drowned in his own blood by the hands of district twelve’s tribute. Imagine that?
I’m a thinker, not a fighter. I would probably die in the bloodbath too. There’s not much strategy that goes on when the Gamemakers pretty much decide who dies and who lives. I could probably be a good Gamemakers. The key is keeping the public entertained throughout the entire thing.
Alright, so enough about that. Lets talk about the now, shall we? Where am I going with my life? Where do I see myself in twenty years? Those are some typical questions people ask in school, aren’t they? Now, I’m working in a refinery with my mom; forced to take joy in the little things life offers me. If I don’t, I’ll snap, and I know it. In twenty years, I’ll probably still be single because I don’t like to commit. I still am working in this dead-end job because I simply don’t have a choice. But hey, at least I’ll still be alive, right?
Codeword: odair
Attractiveness is completely relative; it’s hard to imagine anything being attractive these days. The air is completely enveloped in some thick layer of smog that makes it hard for everyone to breath; so how can anyone be super attractive if their simply just coughing all the time. I’m not saying I have a cough, hell, I’m young and fit; I do all my physical activity indoors so that the poison doesn’t seep into my lungs. I’m not entirely sure that’s really how it works; but then again, what does it really matter? We’re doomed to a tragic fate no matter how you spin it.
My skin is fairly dark. I’m not talking covered in soot or oil dark; I’m talking a naturally healthy glow, a tan or brown, I don’t know. It seems to work out whenever I want to mingle with the ladies; it’s a good starting point. Not many other people in the district have my skin color. My eyes are a light brown, almost a perfect contrast to the darkness of my skin. Every year I see people marvel at the beauty of the tributes from district one, but I don’t see anything too special. Sure, blue eyes are absolutely fascinating, but my light brown eyes shouldn’t be any less heralded right? It’s only genetics.
I like to switch up my hairstyles pretty frequently. Once, I had it long and straight, it fell down to my waist, but my face is so smooth and babyish that I had a few people tell me I looked like a girl. That’s when I started to grow out my facial hair. I always maintain a thin mustache; it’s so close to my face that it actually looks like someone drew fake hair on my upper lip. My facial hair is a bit darker than the hair on top of my head, I don’t know why it works out that way, it just does. I grow hair faster than a lot of the lighter-skinned kids in my district. Funny how that works out isn’t it? Others with my skin color have the same issue, but then you get to the darkest of the dark, and their hair grows no faster than the whitest of the white. Sometimes I wish I were born in the Capitol…or even district three…maybe even district six so that I had the opportunity to research these sorts of things through technology or medicine. But alas, I’m doomed to oil.
Ok, back to my hair. I don’t really sport the long hair too much anymore. It’s way too much grease patrol and maintenance. Plus, working in the refinery like I do, it tends to get extremely dirty…and I like my cleanliness. There’s an old saying that has outlasted the wars, it’s so old, I don’t think anyone in all of Panem can remember where it originated, not even those who live in the Capitol. I think it goes something like, “cleanliness is close to godliness.” I’m sure the Careers would disagree. They think brutality and warriorness is close to godliness. And maybe in this world it is. Panem’s a brutal place, and while I’m glad I’m not living in a farming district or something like that; district five is hardly any better.
I keep going off on a tangent, don’t I? My hair. Now I just wear it in some kind of bowl shape, or I cut it and let it fly forward on it’s own. It’s a very typical hairstyle, but when I wear my bowl cut I like to dress a little bit more fashionably than normal. While most of my clothing is covered in grease stains, oil, and soot; I like to dress nicely on some occasion. It always pays to have good clothes; I consider myself a bit of a shopper. I love the way my skin looks in contrast so some of the darker greens and purples. I look at myself in the mirror, and sometimes I feel like I have my own personal stylists like the tributes at the Parade. But of course, I don’t. It’s just my mom and me living at home, but she’ll get me pretty much any article of clothing I want. She’s good at that sort of thing.
My body is a weird thing. No matter how much I work out, no matter how long I run or how much weight I find myself lifting; I can never seem to get in the shape that I see these Career tributes in during the Games. It’s absolutely amazing. Their bodies are sculpted to such perfection; and I know it’s not just to be more athletic. They all have trainers and advisors; they know the exact science of body sculpting. The more fit and attractive you look to the sponsors, the more money they’ll give you. It’s a simple math equation. Toss in a bunch of numbers concerning reps, weight, miles, hours working out…you know what I’m getting at, its probably something they’ve perfected over the years. Here in this district, we just have to work with what we’ve got. And that’s just not that much.
Ok, back to my body. I’m not the biggest person, but I’m nowhere near the smallest either. Maybe my diet has to do with why my body looks the way it does. It’s pretty flabby, but not fat. It just seems to me like there’s almost nothing I can do to lose it. I lose weight, sure, but those pockets of fat just manage to stay attached to my body. It’s absolutely annoying. But I make up for it in loose clothing, beautiful skin, and a positive attitude.
Oh yea, and how could I forget about my feet? My feet are absolutely gigantic. I have to find custom-made shoes, because the shoe stores can’t turn a profit on making shoes my size. Which size? Size eighteen. Yes. I’m only six feet tall, but my shoes are like mini boats. My friends have always joked if we were ever stranded out at sea, that we could just grab onto my shoes and they would float us to safety. It’s a stupid joke, because honestly, when will we ever have the freedom to go out to see?
--
Ok so, now we’re going to talk about my personality right? Isn’t that a weird question to ask somebody? Haven’t you ever been in a classroom, and they always ask you, “Okay everyone, you’re going to tell us your name, and three interesting things about yourself,” or maybe they’ll ask you, “three words to describe you, and why?” Do you understand how hard it is to describe yourself in only three words? I have sixteen years of life experience and a butt load of self-reflection and introspection, and you expect to figure out what kind of person I am by knowing three facts or three adjectives? That’s utterly ridiculous to me. But I guess I might as well try. Lets start with the facts.
I like to think outside the box. That’s always the first thing I say, but it doesn’t really say enough about me, does it? If I heard someone else say that, I’d start engaging myself in some sort of internal debate on what they actually meant by that. Are they creative? Are they intelligent? Do they manage to get things done through an array of unorthodox methods that seem unusual and sometimes insane to other people? Or do they think by saying that they think outside the box, that every wrong answer they give in class will be thought of as just that person’s interesting way of thinking? Me? All of those imply.
School is hard for most kids nowadays. There’s no money to afford private tutors or high quality textbooks; everything is so career-oriented…or I guess I should say job oriented when considering the setting that we’re in…it’s just hard to learn anything that won’t make you money. On top of that, why WOULD anyone want to learn anything that wouldn’t make you any money? It just doesn’t make sense. Humans are objects of functionality; they take in any and all information that would help them survive the longest, and use it to their advantage, disregarding anything that might be considered useless or ancillary knowledge. Not me though. I like to think outside the box. I guess that brings me to the three adjectives, and how this fact related to them. Am I creative, am I intelligent, or do I just hate to be looked at as a guy who gets things wrong. At this point, it’s hard to say I’m not all of those things. For now, the word will be outside the box. I know its not one word, but hell people, I’m thinking outside the damn box!
Ok so, onto the second fact. I feel like I was born in the wrong district. Now, it doesn’t take an absolute genius like me to figure out just how unfair this social and economic caste system is in Panem. People are born into their jobs, born into a sequence of events that is virtually unchangeable, especially in the lower districts; and the only escape is either death, or a roulette in which the entirety of our nation and the Gamesmakers control your fate. I would love just once to see the college of district six, where intellectuals such as myself go to improve their areas of expertise. Here in disrict five, I don’t even know what my area of expertise is. Because I work in a refinery…a decent, hardworking job…but it just doesn’t stimulate the mind like I want it to.
But like I said before, it could be way worse. My family is by no means starving; we might spend almost each and every day working our hearts out, but we don’t have to take tesserae as often as those in the lower districts. The slums of district five are bad enough, I can only imagine what it looks like in eleven or twelve. Every year when the victory tour is held, the tributes always seem to have spent the least time in those districts; I imagine it must be for a reason. So, I guess it’s time to get to that second adjective isn’t it. Why don’t we go with…misplace. Yea, misplaced works. I should be in one place, but I’m actually in this place. And this place sucks.
So, now onto our third and final tidbit of information. I always like to create some sort of theme for my though process. I figure since we’re doing threes, I can split it up that way too. Creativity is a spiritual thing, isn’t it? I remember hearing once that people who train in the martial arts tend to split things in to the mind, body, and heart. But where does creativity fit? Isn’t it a blend of heart and mind? Being born in the wrong district is a physical thing, so I can just cross that off right now; and being that I rambled on about my level of intelligence, it’s hard to see that “out of the box” adjective not fall into the mind category. Now that I think about it, the preceding “I think” before the “out of the box” should have been a dead give away.
So what does that leave? The heart. A funny thing, the heart. People always attribute the heart to the feeling of love, but really, isn’t that more of a mind thing? You’re always thinking about a specific person; you notice every little thing they do, and every-time you’re apart your mind races when you think about what they might be doing. The powerful emotions of jealously and envy are invoked by the mind, not the heart. The heart just keeps your blood pumping, and keeps you alive. But for dissection purposes, I guess it’s best to stay along the themes of love.
Love hasn’t been easy for me. I don’t get easily attached to any one person; I get attached to ideas and thoughts. Of course like any other teenage boy I have physical urges that I need satisfied; that’s never been entirely difficult. But love. A metaphysical attraction to another human being has never seemed logical to me. Codependence is too risky to make a reality; but it’s not like I don’t seek companionship. Women are always asking me to commit, as if I’m going to run away if the word “boyfriend” isn’t written on my forehead. I just don’t understand it, is all. So, the third and final word to describe my personality…lets go with…unloving.
Outside of the box, misplaced, and unloving. Those words together seem rather overdramatic and depressing, don’t they? But they’re not. I’m content with who I am, I’m just not content with where I am. I never have been. I guess that’s the point to which we’ll get to my history. But where to start?
The beginning, of course. My parents met in the refinery I work at today; my mom was a beautiful young woman with skin even darker than mine and hair even longer than mine had ever been. It’s weird comparing myself to my mother, because we are vastly different people. But my father…people tell me I’m so much like my father. I look like a darker, stouter version of him, and they say he was one of the smartest men they’d ever known. And yes, like any other unfortunate bastard, I wish I had known him. It’s not something that haunts my dreams at night, but it’s certainly something that’s had an impact on the man I am today. Before his death, he was too vocal against the Capitol. He wanted change, and he tried to inspire others to seize that change with him. People are cowardly creatures. One by one, people are weak. But together, people can be strong…I just know it. But Panem has been so broken down and battered I just don’t see that happening. We’ll need a leader, a strong one. My dad wasn’t charismatic enough; he had the ideas, he just went about the execution wrong. Until his execution went right. Irony puts a bitter taste in my mouth sometimes.
My birth was nothing extraordinary. I was a normally sized boy throughout my entire childhood. I had friends, and I had enemies. I had love interests and I had gotten into fights. Everything in my childhood had been utterly typical and amazingly uninteresting. But one thing I had developed over the years is a fondness for information. It always amazed me how in the Capitol, resources and information were available by the literal click of a button; here, it’s very difficult to get information from one end of the district to the next. It didn’t take me too long to figure out how much of an advantage that gave them over us if a rebellion broke out. How lucky they are.
My mother is the only family I have now. We both work in the refinery, just building upon the stockpiled resources that the Capitol has. It’s not fulfilling work, but someone has to make money to survive, and we’d rather not take our chances with putting me in line for the hunger games. Oh right, I guess that’s the another thing I’ll talk about right? The Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games have always been fascinating, especially the way your views change about them as you grow older. As a young boy, I love the action involved. I didn’t know any better. The deaths were violent and bloody, people died in the most poetic ways; even those I knew from district five who had died in the games had died in ways that made the whole thing seem entirely fake. But it wasn’t.
I would like to think of a time where kids loved to have birthdays. Where parties were thrown in honor of a child getting older, where people ate cake and pastries, where they played games and sang joyous songs. It’s hard to think a period like that existed in our history; now, birthdays are simply frightening. I remember when I turned twelve, and I remember my first reaping. I had my best clothes on; almost like I was dressing for my own funeral. Sally Hopkins and Jimmy Teever were chosen…both of them died in the bloodbath. Sally had her head chopped clean off by a sword…Jimmy was drowned in his own blood by the hands of district twelve’s tribute. Imagine that?
I’m a thinker, not a fighter. I would probably die in the bloodbath too. There’s not much strategy that goes on when the Gamemakers pretty much decide who dies and who lives. I could probably be a good Gamemakers. The key is keeping the public entertained throughout the entire thing.
Alright, so enough about that. Lets talk about the now, shall we? Where am I going with my life? Where do I see myself in twenty years? Those are some typical questions people ask in school, aren’t they? Now, I’m working in a refinery with my mom; forced to take joy in the little things life offers me. If I don’t, I’ll snap, and I know it. In twenty years, I’ll probably still be single because I don’t like to commit. I still am working in this dead-end job because I simply don’t have a choice. But hey, at least I’ll still be alive, right?
Codeword: odair
