Allard Lindsey, District 6 [Done]

{And you can tell everybody this is your song}
{It may be quite simple but now that it's done}
{I hope you don't mind}
{I hope you don't mind that I put down in words}
{How wonderful life is while you're in the world}

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{Name} Allard Lindsey

{Age} 33

{Gender}Male

{District} 6

{Occupation} Research Psychiatrist

{1}
Greet the world with a smile, no matter the circumstances

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Why does the whole world have to be so negative? We’ve got maybe (if we’re lucky[/color]) about seventy years, tops. My grandmother lived the longest in our family, to about—seventy-three, I think. She saw the world go from what it was, to what it could have been, right back to what it is now. She never stopped believing that even as bad as everything could be, there wasn’t a reason we couldn’t be better to one another. Kind of hard when the whole world has gone to absolute shit, I get it, but somehow I’ve come to see the positive even after all these years. I mean, I didn’t get picked for the reaping, I’m not dead, and I’m doing what I love to do (sort of). The odds have probably been in my favor more than most people’s, but that’s all the more reason that I have to give back. It’s why I live by my code of ethics. I’ve collected five rules, but I’m always changing them. It’s that we should never stop learning, even when we’re on our death beds.

My smile is the first thing I think people notice about me anyway, so it’s no surprise that it’s at the top of the list. I can’t help but be a little giddy. I’ve got no one to look after except for the boys and girls that I want to, and—well, I guess it’s given me a certain sense of freedom. Sure I live in a wimpy little apartment with a broken little television and a tiny little kitchen that barely works (the stove constantly doesn’t light but that’s okay considering most things I eat are out of a can[/color] ), but I don’t owe anything to anyone (except the capitol, but we all owe them, don’t we?[/color]). I remember reading somewhere that if we let ourselves shine, then it gives everyone else a reason to shine—like, if we’re a candle burning brightly, then everyone else has the obligation to do the same. I think it’s the reason why everyone is so down all the time, that they don’t let themselves shine.

It’s easier said than done, I know. Without any kids or brother or sisters I don’t have anyone to send into the games. I could just as well disappear and no one would know, or I could shoulder my own burden by taking in someone that needs a home. That’s why I get the animosity toward me, not caring when the reaping rolls around and I just shrug my shoulders and go about my own business. I still feel sorry for the boys and girls that have to go into the games, don’t get me wrong. I still think it must be terrifying, excruciating, and altogether evil. But it’s hard to feel connected to something that’s so distant. And so I stay positive, too, because I feel as though it can give others the hope—the belief that when you make it out alive, after the reapings, things do get better. You can still live your life, and you can still be yourself. There is an after and that after can be just as awesome as you want it to be.

My weight? Oh. Well, yeah, I guess I haven’t really paid much attention to what I have been eating. When you only have to fill your own mouth and you have a decent job, it’s not so hard to make ends meet. I guess I’ve had a few more sweets than I should. I fry a lot of things, too. Vegetables… well, they’re not really a part of my diet, no. I never had much of them growing up so I don’t really know what to do with them even when they’re on my plate. I mean it really is a gift that I’m giving them up so that other people have a chance to eat them, right? Okay, that was a bad joke but you have to admit that in some sense the logic does work. We don’t have enough to go around of the real food, since most of it gets shipped off to the capitol. This just frees enough for everyone else (especially the big families in this district).

I’ve got a killer set of frames. That’s a plus, because I actually think they make me look a whole lot more distinguished than I am. People used to think me being a Doctor was a lie, but it’s so much more believable when they see me wearing glasses. I don’t know what the reason is, whether they just make me look older or smarter, but I guess before I looked like an idiot. Funny how people are so willing to believe something just based on what they see. That’s a lesson in itself. It’s why I do my best to at least shave once in a while. People seem to not trust me as much with a shaggy beard or if my hair is a mess. It’s pretty hard to keep track of it though, when my appearance is pretty far down on the list. It could have been better if I felt like any of that stuff mattered around here.

{2}
When someone shows you who they are, believe them

There are a lot of people that like to believe in change. When it comes to people, I can tell you that this is—and I’m not being negative, no—that this is flat out wrong. Most people are exactly who they say they are. Now they’re not going to come right out and say I like to slaughter small children for fun, no, that’s not going to be right there on the surface. But when someone shies away from a conversation, or they talk down to you because they think how much smarter they are about something—you need to pay attention. We have all these little signs that we give off to show just exactly who we are. The older you get, the more you start to realize that there really aren’t any surprises about anyone. Some people like to act mysterious or as though they’ve got something buried deep inside. Most of the time this is only half-true; they just are self-centered and don’t realize how much like everyone else they really are. Gosh that sounds pretty negative when I put that all out for the world to see.

I’m more of a realist than an eternal optimist. I try to keep my head up but I do like to point out to people when the world is round rather than flat. It can be so infuriating when people ignore all of those signs—the ones where we think someone really loves us or cares about us but then it turns out that they never did. I try to wear my heart on my sleeve because 1) I don’t suck and 2) because I have the decency to show who I am to the people that I care about. We’ve got too much else to be focused on to care about showing off for other people. Communication is just… it’s so important that people tend to forget just what we’re supposed to be doing with one another. I mean, why on earth—at this point—why wouldn’t I want to tell someone how I feel about them? It’s why I laugh so much with the kids that I work with. They’re still figuring—they’re working out just what everything means. They get so upset at what I think are pretty trivial things. I would never get upset about some of the things they do, and I think that’s a good thing. I’m supposed to be an adult. I think that’s what happens when you graduate out of the reapings, after all. But then there’s the fact that there are so many adults that walk around with fucked up views on the world. Like, I’ve heard that there are parents that push kids into the games because of some kind of weird desire to see them win. Or worse, because they don’t want them around anymore. If I ever had a kid—a big if—I’d probably do my best to just make sure they grew up to be well adjusted and not entirely screwed up from living in this district.

{3}
Mind the ones who matter, the ones who mind don’t matter

I don’t have a lot of friends. I’ll come right out and say it. You might feel a little bit sorry for me, but, to be honest, I don’t think there’s much of a problem with that. I’ve got my work to keep me busy, and I’ve come up with my own reason for this. In all my years I think there are only a couple of people at best that I want to spend any time with. There is an enormous amount of time wasted on people that don’t matter. I always say that you have to give your energy to the ones that matter because otherwise you’re going to wind up exhausted. There are plenty of people that will suck the energy out of you if they get the chance. And some of these people are going to really need you, don’t get me wrong! But then there are going to be a lot of them that just don’t even—they’ll take and take until you don’t have anything else left to give.

Gosh the more I say the lousier I feel like I sound. I do think that everyone deserves a chance. We can’t shut someone out just because they seem a certain way. That whole judgment thing is super easy to do, and I know I do it all the time, but it’s not good. There’s so much to learn from everyone that to not take a chance on someone can be such a missed opportunity. I might be speaking from experience to say that I think that I’ve missed too many opportunities in my own life. It’s why I’ve got to just… keep smiling. No matter what. I can let it get to me or I could not, since there is a whole lot of negativity that could have been weighing me down at this point. But I don’t let that happen, since I know I’ve got a whole lot going for me, and a lot more to give.

{4}
Don’t worry about what you have, worry about everyone else having enough

Don’t look at me like I’m some sort of white knight savior for saying that. If it was common knowledge then I guess it wouldn’t be so shocking. But whole of us—everyone in this district, anyway—we don’t do enough for people who don’t have what they need. I used to think so much about what I had not being equal to what other people had. Man did that drive me nuts. I used to wonder why I couldn’t live in one of the upper districts and live in the life of luxury. And then I got smacked on my head, and my grandmother, she told me that I was just a plain idiot for not seeing what I was doing. I cared more about what was on my plate, and completely forgot about all the plates that were empty around me. Because that’s the long and the short of it. We go around thinking that we have just enough, and we want more. More food. More money. More clothes. A bigger house. More, more, more. So we forget about everything else, right? We forget just as easily how hard it is to keep it all together when we don’t care about anyone but ourselves.

Oh that good old capitol mentality. Give me what I want and screw everyone else. How much harder is it to think about what someone else is supposed to have? It gives some people shivers, just the thought. I’ve tried to pound it into people’s heads, you wouldn’t believe how much sacrilege I must have committed. I’m sure I’ll get in trouble eventually, but—well, if I’m going to leave anything behind, it might as well be a philosophy for the greater good. Listen to me, I sound like I’m some kind of hero. I’m really not—I’m just doing what any normal guy should be doing when the whole world has gone to hell. When we’re trapped by what we’ve created, we got to change, and that starts at the bottom. I just hope someone eventually gets to the top to change it.

{5}
Have fun.

After all that, were you expecting that I was going to say something along the lines that, “life is a journey and blah blah blah something something important diatribe about what matters?” I’m not a philosopher, I’m just a—well I guess I’m a scientist but really I’m just a Doctor. I don’t have any great discoveries to my name, other than the fact that I can use what I have to help people. It’s a little dangerous, but then, what isn’t other than breathing around here. Still, I bet you were thinking I was going to give you one more aphorism to live by, when this one might actually be the most important. People are just so—they don’t know how to have fun anymore. Adults, we don’t—no one my age seems to want to have the least bit of fun, outside of things that aren’t necessarily legal. Yeah, there’s the whole making babies part that I guess could work in there but, that doesn’t really count I don’t think.

I grew up the only child of Roan and Morgan Lindsey. The both of them were chemists, and they spent a good amount of their time working around hazardous chemicals. They made solvents for the capitol, glues, all sorts of useful things. They also always came home smelling like death. I still get a chill when I smell anything close to disinfectant. I hate that smell, it reminds me so much of when they’d come home from work late at night, and I wouldn’t see them but I would know that they were there. It was hard on the both of them, working long hours and not seeing me much. I think my father liked it that way. He seemed to be completely absorbed by his work. My mother on the other hand always tried her hardest to make time for me. We still celebrated little things, and she did her best to buy me toys or take me places where I could learn about history or the capitol. I guess she felt guilty that I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and tried to make up for that with all the things that we’d do together.

In school I was toward the top of the class. I kept my head down, got good grades, did what I was supposed to do. I wasn’t the biggest explorer or bad child. I think I might have drank some alcohol when I was sixteen and maybe taken a drop of morphling or two just to see what it was like. But overall I’d say things were pretty average. That sounds bad but I’ve found that average childhoods are pretty far and away in District Six. All the kids that I work with anyway, they seem to come from places that just don’t love them very much. So many people have lost siblings, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles—you name it—I think I have my work cut out for me. I was lucky that I had the both of them for as long as I did. Now that it’s just me, I’m kind of—well I am drifting around, just sort of doing my own thing. Makes it easier to relate to the rest of the people that don’t have families, thought.

They died when I was twenty-six, so all in all I can be thankful. I had just finished school and earned my degrees. I was set to be a full psychiatrist, one that did research on medicines produced by and for the capitol. Thankfully I work with the animal division, which means that I don’t have to test on any human subjects. I’m not quite sure if I could bring myself to do that sort of thing. We use the drugs to elicit different types of feelings. Happy, sad, angry, scared, whatever we can manufacture and make. It’s all supposed to be for capitolites to safely be able to experience (and feel better) with their lives. I basically stand in a white coat all day giving rats, bunnies, and the occasional chimp tablets, and then I test them. I record the results and at the end of every trial I get a bunch of new animals and drugs to test. Pretty simple stuff. It keeps me fed and I get to do what I want.

It started off as a lark really. I mean I didn’t actually think anyone would ever want me to be their doctor. I still haven’t told anyone that the most psychiatric evaluation I’ve ever done has been on lab mice. I think that might undermine their confidence in me just a little bit, don’t you? Well, I got through the drudgery just like everyone else does. The day in, day out toil of doing your job once you’ve gotten to that age, until finally you choose to either be part of the problem or part of the solution. So I decided, in a completely non-creepy and helpful way, that I was going to start taking in patients to help them with their problems. I guess it all started when I realize just how shitty of a person that I was becoming. I was turning into just like everyone else—someone stuck where they were, in a world where I couldn’t do a damn thing. And so I had two choices, really. I could continue to be part of the life-suck, the one where the capitol bosses us around and I just say the heck with everyone else, I’m just going to do what I need to survive. Which is what I was doing for a long, long time. Or, I could decide to do something different.

It only happens after dark, which makes it all the more scary and creepy, I guess. But really it’s the only time I have an open office where I can bring in patients and have them gab about what’s wrong with them. I guess it’s in my nature to want to solve problems, too. So I just started advertising, at local pubs, to different people—quiet at first—that I could help them get through whatever it is that they’re suffering from. There are those that want the drugs—I can tell that, and that’s why I don’t really offer them. I mean, in some cases it’s absolutely necessary, but, if I can get people to realize how to better their lives well, that’s the first step. Drugs are just a crutch when the rest of the options have been exhausted. I mean, there is only so much trauma or depression that one person can take. The other problem, too, with just handing out drugs is that I can’t go depleting the supplies we have without someone noticing. But then, people don’t change the world by sitting back and doing nothing.

I fully expect that this is a completely stupid plan and that I’ll wind up on the news and in the detention center. I just figure that there’s only so much I can give back to the world, and I have to start somewhere. So I’ll see how long this can last, and who it is that I can help. If that means crashing and burning and being thrown out—well, I guess I’m at that point.


Word count: 3370
Ooc: Dr. Allard Lindsey has decided to open his own backdoor psychiatrist office, to help the people of panem with their problems. That’s pretty much it!
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