Andra Lynn Griffin's Journal

[profile/survey - winter river]
BASIC STATS
NAME: Andra Lynn Griffin
NICKNAMES: Bean to her Dad, Griffindor to Keely, and just Griff to everyone else. Paul and Conner can get away with calling her by her proper name.
AGE: 17
BIRTHDAY: November 18
GENDER: Female. Debatably. Sometimes she doesn't quite identify as such.
OCCUPATION: Student, writer (though she's not published yet).
PETS: At home she has a black tomcat named Dante and a black miki/dachshund mix named Quidditch.

BACKGROUND
HOME: Griff would like to point out that home, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. During the academic year she lives at school in Winter River, Vermont. Summers and occasional holiday breaks find her in West Hempstead, Long Island with her parents.
FINANCE: Not outstandingly well-off. Her education is paid for with money left by her grandmother who passed away.
SCHOOL: Winter River Prep School
BEST SUBJECTS: English, natural sciences, social sciences.
WORST SUBJECTS: Any sort of math, applied sciences, history.
EXTRACURRICULARS: Varsity Volleyball, Mixed Chorus (Alto), Newspaper, Yearbook, Literary Magazine, SADD, Drama Club, French Club
FAMILY HISTORY: Griff has two sisters who are fifteen and seventeen years older than she is -- her mother's from a previous marriage. Griff is her father's only child, and she is a complete Daddy's girl. She doesn't get along with her mother at all -- she makes Griff feel degraded, unloved, and underappreciated. She isn't certain if her parents are conservative or just old-fashioned, but she is pretty certain that she'd end up sent off to someplace worse than where she is now if she were open with them about her world views and her self-identity. She tries not to make a fuss over it because she feels this is tragically normal and nobody wants to hear people whine about problems that everybody has.

When Griff was nine years old her Nanny (her mother's mother) died of mesothelioma and left enough money for Griff to be sent to a good school. Griff was always a bright if slightly sullen child, and it was obvious to her grandmother that she would need a better education than her daughter and son-in-law could provide working as a bus driver and a mailman, respectively. After her grandmother's death, Griff drew into herself. She never cried about it, even though Nanny had been her favorite person in the universe. Instead, she stayed strong for other people, and when she needed to escape she turned to the written word, reading anything she could get her hands on.

Otherwise, Griff has suffered no major traumas in her life. She is quite normal, even if she borders on emo sometimes.

APPEARANCE
HEIGHT: 5'4"
WEIGHT: 131 pounds
EYES: Dark blue
HAIR: Red
FACE & COMPLEXION: Pale, pale, pale!
BUILD: Average.
DEFINING MARKS: A very light heart-shaped birthmark where her collarbones meet. A surgical scar on her stomach, below and to the right of her belly button.
DRESS STYLE: Her favorite thing to wear is pajamas. If it's at all possible, that's what you'll find her in. Sometimes she'll even go out in them -- if she's in a bold enough mood, she's not above wandering about in public in red flanel lounge pants with yellow duckies on them. Other than PJs and her uniform, she wears mostly street pants and tee shirts ranging anywhere from band tees advertising bands you probably wouldn't imagine her listening to, to plain solid-color ones.
POSSESSIONS ALWAYS ON PERSON: Her watch, her pedometer, her cell phone, a spork, and something to write with.
MANNER OF SPEECH: Thoughtful and deliberate. She tries not to waste words and can be very tricky in choosing them.
MANNER OF MOVEMENT: Have you ever tried crossing the street in New York City during rush hour without touching any of the people coming the other way? Griff can do it.

PERSONALITY
BEHAVIOR/PERSONALITY: By and large, Griff is not quick to react. No matter how angry she gets at someone, she is not likely to shoot off her mouth right then and there. Instead, she'll sit on it for a while, see if she can tell if the person meant what they said/did or if it was just a stupid slip, and then decide what to do. Should anyone actually inspire her wrath, they'd get a thorough, thought-out tongue lashing that would likely render them speechless and totally unable to come up with a rational response. As I've said repeatedly and will probably keep repeating, Griff's a thinker before she's a feeler.

Her mother's attitude toward her gives Griff somewhat low self-esteem, even though she tries to overcome it. Even though she's in more than a half a dozen extracirricular groups, she still sees herself as unsocial, possibly not worthy of popularity.

Since she's not entirely comfortable with her sexual identity, using the term "currently uninterested" instead of "asexual" even with her friends, she spends a fair amount of time wallowing in teenage angst over feeling unable to really be herself because this 'fourth option' is not widely accepted as a real form of sexuality. And on a less self-centered note, her feeling that her unsupportive family life is "tragically normal" and her feeling that "the state of the world is not something to smile over" are indications that she also angsts for humanity in general.
GOALS/DREAMS: To be a funeral director or psychiatrist and freelance writer, to adopt a kid when she's in her 30s, and to eventually die peacefully with as few regrets as possible.
QUIRKS/HABITS: One of her biggest quirks -- labeled as such by her mother, much to her annoyance -- is her tendency toward androgyny (hence the journal name -- a combination of that term and her name). She's pretty gender-neutral when it comes to her personality. When people see her bookshelves, her bedroom, her notebooks, and anything else into which she's incorporated a personal touch, they're not sure if it belongs to a slightly feminine guy or a slightly butch girl. She's tried for androgyny in her appearance, but her face is simply too girly and she can't bear to cut her hair into a more neutral style.

Griff also has a strange and completely random love of sporks. She collects them, and has a shoebox full of them under her bed. All sorts of colors, textures, and different types of plastic! She even has one made of metal. If you ask her, she'll very seriously explain how they are the perfect metaphor for the duality of humankind, but then she'll flash a grin before walking away, so nobody has ever been able to determine if she means it or not.

She bites her nails when she thinks, and when she gets them down so low that she can't bite them anymore, she chews on her tongue instead. Sometimes to the point of making it bleed.

Her most troublesome quirk is her need to constantly know what time it is. Her watch, alarm clock, cell phone, laptop, and pedometer clocks are all meticulously and perfectly sychronized, and if she is ever in a position where she can't find out what time it is without asking someone else, she goes into a panic.

The pedometer needs a little explanation, since it's a bit of completely random weirdness. She always carries it around with her, not because she's actually counting how many steps she takes in a day or anything like that, but because she likes the ticky noise it makes with each step.

Other quirks are mostly due to mild OCD (like certain things always needing to be in certain places, even if it's not necessarily tidy) and don't really require huge explanations since they don't really effect those around her that much. She isn't the sort to flip out when she notices that someone took Chamber of Secrets off the pile to read it and put it back on top of Sorcerer's Stone. She'd just place it back where it belonged and ask politely if people could return things to the place they found them in.
LIKES: ... Just skim over her list of interests for an idea. There are a lot of them. But it pretty much boils down to "film, music, literature, and some other really random stuff."
DISLIKES: Griff is too laid-back and contemplative to let much annoy her. She's a thinker and can rationalize pretty much anything, even if she doesn't agree with it. But a few things do tap dance on her nerves. She doesn't like girls (and guys, because they're guilty of it sometimes, too) who need to have a significant other to feel that they're worth something. The sound of erasers on rough paper makes her skin crawl, and sometimes the color purple is just irritating. Also, people who think American comedy is the epitome of funny also annoy the hell out of her. But even more than that, she dislikes intolerance. She very rarely finds the voice to speak out against it, but it makes her angry and hurt when she sees it happening in the world. Sometimes she has a habit of playing Devil's Advocate for things she doesn't agree with, so she's been known to give the impression of disliking a lot more things than she actually does, but she doesn't really hate much of anything.
USUALLY FOUND: Anyplace quiet enough for her to think.
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

HEALTH
EYESIGHT: 20/40
HEARING: Only has about 60% hearing in her left ear
LEFT/RIGHT/AMBI: She writes right-handed, but does most everything else left-handed.
DISABILITIES/HANDICAPS: Nothing outstanding.
PHYSICAL HEALTH: Rather shoddy, actually. In November of 2002 she had surgery to remove a benign tumor from her pituitary gland, thus correcting a case of Cushing's Disease. She's prone to migraines, and has chronic sinus issues due to a cyst that takes up the entire left half of her sinus cavity which the doctors don't want to remove because it doesn't cause any serious problems. She gets ear infections, suffers insomnia, and is on antidepressants but doesn't tell anyone.

PSYCHOLOGY
IQ: 135 (moderately gifted)
INTROVERT/EXTROVERT: Introvert.
PHOBIAS/FEARS: Heights, tight spaces, bugs.
MENTAL HEALTH: Not bad, all things considered.

ROMANTIC
MARITAL STATUS: Single.
SEXUAL PREFERENCE: Internally this is a really important question. Outwardly, not so much. Griff keeps her sexual identity to herself, feeling it's really nobody's business. She's actually asexual -- simply doesn't experience real sexual attraction -- but she's also an aesthete and appreciates both male and female beauty and can form strong emotional bonds with both males and females, so she identifies as bisexual.
TURN ONS: None, as such, since she doesn't experience sexual attraction. She is, however, drawn to people with a lot of abnormalities and quirks. Despite the fact that she tries to behave as normally as possible, she doesn't like people who are bland and average.
TURN OFFS: Blandness, poor conversational skills, people who discriminate based on gender, race, religion, age, sexuality, disability, et cetera.
PAST RELATIONSHIPS: None, really. She's been with a couple of people from home, but the relationships weren't all that serious.

FAVORITES
ANIMAL: Lions.
BOOK(S): 1984, Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire, Mort, American Gods, Frankenstein, Le Petit Prince, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Choke, Good Omens... Could keep going forever.
COLOR: Yellow.
DRINK: Sprite, milk.
FOOD: Pizza and wings can make anything okay.
FLOWER: Tulips.
MOVIE(S): Besieged, Gangster No. 1, Naked, Fight Club (though the book was better), Amélie, Angels in America (though the play was better), The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Last Unicorn (though the book was better), Chattahoochee, The Producers (though the play was better), Tiptoes, Prisoner of Azkaban (though the book was better), Coffee and Cigarettes, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (though the play was better), The Lion King, The Importance of Being Earnest (though the play was better), The Incredibles... Again, could go on all day.
MUSIC: EVERYTHING. Currently she's on an indie rock kick, but there is nothing that she won't listen to.
SCENT: Baking bread, clean laundry.

LEAST FAVORITES
ANIMAL: Bugs of any sort.
BOOK: Catcher in the Rye
COLOR: Purple.
DRINK: Mountain Dew.
FOOD: Pork, ham, bacon -- anything that comes from pigs. It's not a matter of principle; she just doesn't like the taste.
FLOWER: Thistles.
MOVIE: Super Troopers is the stupidest film she has ever seen. In general she dislikes American comedy, thinking it juvenile, pointless, and really just not funny.
MUSIC: There simply isn't music she really dislikes.
SCENT: Hospitals. The clean smell can never quite mask the sick smell.

ASTROLOGY
SIGN: Scorpio
KEYWORDS: "I control."
PLANETARY RULER: Pluto
RULES OVER: Nose, genitals, urethra, bladder.
POSITIVES: Intuitive, emotional and social.
NEGATIVES: Needy, moody and tempestuous.
GEMINI ATTRACTIONS: Capricorn, Leo, Pisces.