Janice
Name: Janice Fitzpatrick
(
J.J., Jan-jan, etc.)
Birthdate: April 24th, 1978
Profession: Runs a small catering company.
Race: Cuban (adopted, yo.)
Appearance: Tallish. Twiggy. A freckly, greasy mess of a woman. Wears power ties on some days. Her hair might remind one of an oil spill.
Fixations: Windup toys, nutrition, organization
Likes: Iced tea, fresh food, 80's movies and fashion, modern jazz, R&B, soul, abstract art, tennis, ping-pong, billiards, brass and percussion instruments, bananas, tomatoes, oversized sweaters, the Blues Brothers
Dislikes: Music written before the mid-20th century, processed foods, red meat, mistakes, sleeping in, perfume, the obesity epidemic, large moneygrubbing corporations
Fears: Failure, being in debt forever, large dogs, vehicles, crowds and cramped spaces, heights, Catholicism
Other Noteworthy Traits: Left-handed, good cook, not bad with percussion instruments.
Personality: There's an odd sort of scrutiny present in Janice's face, for the fact that her attention to detail is almost obsessive. She is a stellar example of perfectionism-- a single mistake she makes at anything she thinks is important is enough to make her shut herself up in her room for a good few days, and she's prone to blame herself and beat herself up for any problems she runs into. She'll tend to forget to eat or refuse to sleep for the sake of quintuple-checking things. Everything in her personal spaces is immaculately organized, and sporadically reorganized in other ways that would be "better". Despite how initially reclusive she is, she's still one of those people who wears her heart on her sleeve: overapologetic to a fault, and one can tell from a mile away if she's happy, upset, angry, or the rest.
Her social awkwardness stems only partially from her inherent shyness, and more from her upbringing. Because she was in private schools for a good part of her life, there are some fundamentals in human communication that she never really had the chance to learn. Her speech is typically quiet, and deliberate, and often quite wordy with the use of similes and metaphors to exaggerate a point. A somewhat extensive vocabulary is used by her, especially when a subject of interest pops up, and her almost complete lack of certain sentence enhancers along with being a few decibels below "indoor voices" makes her sound much like the wallflower she is. Tripping over or mispronouncing a word is something that bothers her to no end, but she's worked to try and suppress any frustration at herself for the sake of a decent conversation. A constant fear of saying something wrong looms over her, but when she feels comfortable around someone she can be quite cheerful-- and even vibrant-- in her demeanor. In those states it's easy to see that she can be live-and-let-live to a fault.
Largely because of how her parents constantly forced it upon her in her childhood, she
hates Shakespeare, Mozart, and other such forms of classical music and literature that an intellectual is supposed to have a higher understanding for. She is more inclined to listen to R&B, jazz or modern instrumental pieces, and her favorite movie is the Blues Brothers (and they're also her favorite music group). It's impossible for her to not love books, however-- shove anything with pages at her and she'll probably read it.
Believe it or not, she makes a lot of room for her hobby: when she isn't studying or at work, she pursues an ever-increasing collection of windup toys that are disassembled, put back together, and just simply played with. Anything that needs to be wound to function seems to make it here: not just little walking cartoon characters, but music boxes and snowglobes as well. Her collection is nearing the two hundred mark.
She's very passionate about food for someone who doesn't eat much of it, and doesn't seem like she's going to give up her job anytime soon even though it's proving hectic enough to drive her haggard.
Background:Janice was born to a Cuban immigrant family who already had too many children to support. As such, she was quickly whisked away to child care services to be put up for adoption. The Fitzpatricks, an upper-class Irish family of Roman Catholics living in Minneapolis, were all too quick in adopting her and getting to work at molding her into the perfect successful daughter they wanted. They needed someone smart to carry on their stockholding business, and something about the infant told them she was the one. She was to be raised an only child among a myriad of sparsely-visiting aunts and uncles.
Whether or not she actually
was born as much of a genius as her parents claim is up for debate. Tutors were forced upon her by the time she knew how to crawl, and she
did learn how to read very early. Her IQ test did also come back quite high at 157, but it's thought among family "friends" that the parents did some slipping of money under the table to achieve that result.
The age of six met her with being enrolled into a all-girl Catholic school, where she spent the first eight grueling years of her education. When she was thirteen, there was one of those teacher-student relationship scandals about the school that was overblown by the media for the fact that it was in a private religious educational facility. This made her parents decide that such a place was far from worth the money it paid for, so Janice was shuttled over to a nearby public high school the following year.
High school proved to have a much more open atmosphere than the private school- but it was hard for the stick-in-the-mud young teen to find a niche. A year of floundering around with various elective classes later, she found a place playing the vibraphone in the school's percussion and jazz band. A "fellow band geek" by the name of Holly Stern quickly became her closest friend, and for once in her life she found herself doing normal teenager things like going to movies and malls and so on and so forth. She also proved to be very adept at the vibraphone. However, she stopped playing it after graduating high school.
This was around the time that Janice opened the gateway to the world of windup toys. A walk around Holly's neighborhood turned up a garage sale at one of the houses, and there on one of the tables was a small collection of about a dozen of the automatons. She originally intended to buy only one for fifty cents, but not an hour later she found herself coming back and buying the rest of them. When her parents discovered them lined up neatly on her desk next to the pencil holder and stapler, the toys were all thrown away by her mother and she was reprimanded by her father, calling them a "childish waste of time and money". One was salvaged and carefully hidden away, and the rest of the collection grew from there, tucked safely away in any hiding places she could find.
During this time, even though she was constantly told that she had the potential to, she never really excelled much in her classes-- it was as if being raised with such overachieving standards in her early childhood had done more harm on her work ethic than good. Her SAT and ACT scores came back... better than decent, one might say. They were not quite enough to hit the mark for one of the "better" private universities, in any case. Still, Janice recieved an acceptance letter from Duke University soon enough to start next fall. Part of the reason behind that was a generous donation from her parents.
They had insisted that she pursue a business major, but a few months into her first semester that plan changed. A health class she took ended up being her favorite, growing into an academic obsession: she often found herself talking to her professor outside of class about it, wanting to understand more and more about it. Her most obvious interest was in nutrition, and she decided quickly enough that she wanted to become a dietician.
When that subject showed up on her bachelor's degree instead of business, it can be guessed that her parents were rather miffed. Along with effectively disowning her, they stopped paying her tuition, leaving her to struggle through paying for her grad program in nutrition and food science by herself-- as well as pay off her tuition for the previous years. It seemed as if she was seen more of an investment than an adopted daughter, and bad investments are meant to be dropped as soon as possible. After two decades of them boasting about her supposed intelligence and how amazingly she would do in the stockholding business, she became a source of shame for the family that was haphazardly swept under the rug.
She worked as a personal trainer for a few months before realizing she hated it, turning around to get food-service training. Around a year ago she opened "To Your Needs", a catering company in St. Louis, MO.
How'd she get to the Island?Her employees forced her to take a vacation (as in dragged kicking and screaming all the way to the airport) after she had a small nervous breakdown.
What Serum do you want?: Chambered nautilus.
Why the nautilus?: There's a few problems that happen with nautili in captivity: Moreau (or whoever administers the serum) wants to see how that would play out on a transformation. Plus, her reclusive demeanor just makes it characteristic.
