Post by Darren van der Wood on Aug 6, 2007 15:14:40 GMT -5
OOC: About You[/u][/size]
Name: Miranda
Age: Fifteen
How Long Have You Been RPing?: About two years.
Contact?: Just PM. But my AIM is war ballistics.
Your Character:[/u][/size]
Basics
Full Name: Darren Gideon van der Wood
Age: Seventeen
Grade: Senior.
Marital Status: Single.
Appearance:[/u]
Physical Appearance:
THE MANY FACES OF DARREN
Well, he's really only got one face, but it is rather pretty. Darren has that sort of boyish charm to him. Maybe it's his young demeanor, maybe it's his uncooperative hair, or maybe it's just that he plays so many sports, but he looks incredibly young for his age. Darren doesn't care much for shaving, nor does he care much for having a beard, however, so you'll usually find him with a fair amount of stubble on his face. He has the shiny type of all-American blue eyes, except he's not American so nobody's really sure where they came from. His hair is goldish and usually doesn't do what he tells it to, so he has to keep it somewhat short or it'll get freakishly out of hand.
DARREN v.2.0
Darren's grandfather on his mother's side was also named Darren, but the two couldn't be more different. Darren 1.0, as he likes to call him, was a large, bulky man who went to a state university and slept with a lot of women. Gross. Darren's more the type who wants to go to a small, private college. He's already starting to work on his applications to Brown, Bard, and Beloit. B seems to be trendy here. With that aside, Darren doesn't have quite the bulk of his grandfather. He stands at six-feet even, but is incredibly skinny.
THE LOCKS
"My hair is a bitch," I'm sure you'll here him say on more than one occassion. Darren's hair is thick and floppy and he can never make it cooperate, no matter how many Bedhead products he uses. He's convinced that those products only sell because the containers are rad, but he can't stop buying them anyway. Eventually he figured it would just be easier to let his hair do its own thing, and when he does do something with it, he usually uses the strongest hair-glue he can find and makes it look purposefully messy. He thinks that makes him look very studly and hot, but everyone else probably thinks otherwise.
Clothing Style:
DARREN THE FASHION QUEEN
Even though Darren is male, he does make sure he looks presentable, but not so much as a stereotypical gay person, or a scenester. Yuck. No, Darren's very simple when it comes to clothes. You'll often find him in just jeans or a plain tee-shirt, but he often likes jeans that are gray or ripped for some originality. He doesn't have any piercings or makeup, he thinks that it just looks ridiculous, especially when people have one ear pierced. He's not closed-minded, he doesn't care if other people dress like that, he's just possitive that he's not going to. He owns a couple of suit jackets that he'll wear if he wants to dress his outfit up, but that's about it. He's a very jeans-and-a-t-shirt kind of guy, which is good because when he's famous, he's going to have to wear logo-less shirts when on t.v. He often wears band shirts of bands he really likes, and sometimes bands he totally hates just to impress people. Darren's somewhat vain, obviously, and probably somewhat fake, too, but you can't really blame him after he's never been in a real relationship and that's all he wants out of life. He will, on occassion, wear skinny jeans, because he wants nothing more than to fit in with the trendy kids.
Any markings/scars/tattoos/piercings?: Naw.
Picture:
Personality:
Personality:
DARREN THE 'HOMOFAGGOT'
In school, there are always boys, particularly the real athletic ones, who engage in a never-ending game of shoving each other and saying, "Who you calling faggot, homo?" which is followed up by a, "Who you callin' homo, faggot?" and so on and so forth. But what happens when you happen to be really athletic, but also said "homofaggot"? Well, that's where you get Darren van der Wood. It's rare in today's society that you get a "real man" type who happens to be homosexual and doesn't care much about fashion besides looking slightly presentable and not smelling disgusting. If he told you he was gay you'd often assume he was joking, seeing as Darren made the premier lacrosse and soccer teams at his school since third year. (He also made the junior teams his first and second years). He's an incredible athlete, so one would assume he can't possibly be gay, right? Well, not quite. Darren is attracted to the type of guys who actually act like guys, he can't stand guys in tight pants or guys who talk with a fake lisp. It's ridiculous. You'd also think he'd get distracted in games, but believe it or not, gay people are horny just as much as straight people, so obviously, not all the time. Besides, all of the boys at school would much rather engage in a game of "homofaggot" than concentrate on their sports. So Darren figures it's just easier to let them think he's straight and be done with it.
DARREN THE STUD
In his middle years of school, Darren was completely convinced that you needed a girlfriend to be a boy. Nearly every week he had a new catch, and gathered his reputation as a very studly guy. However, no matter how many girls he brought home, he wasn't attracted to any of them. Well, actually, he was attracted to one, but that was only personality-wise. Most of the girls in the lower years thought that if you had a boyfriend, you had to act like a slut, and then they got all upset when Darren wasn't 'turned on' by their ridiculous ways of dressing and ass-shaking menuevers. In his fifth year, Darren finally came to terms with himself and stopped dating girls, though he refuses to look for guys until he knows one who is gay and attracted to him. He doesn't want to humiliate himself.
DARREN THE SPORTSMAN
Darren is just about the ultimate sportsman. He doesn't hunt (that's unconventional), but he does fish, camp with his dad, play lacrosse and soccer, and pretty much any other sport that involves going toward a goal and scoring besides American football. Oh, and tennis. He plays tennis. Since his first year he's been working out, and though he's incapable of building muscle bulk, that really doesn't mean anything because all of his strength is compacted into his smaller frame. He tends to do well as a forward position because he can run fast and people don't assume he's all that good because he's smaller than many of the guys on the team.
DARREN THE COMEDIAN
Though his sister Charley may be somewhat 'funnier' than Darren, it's just because she has a more mature sense of humor. Darren tends to laugh more at things that are so ridiculous and so absurd that few people find them funny at all. Charley usually laughs at Darren's stuff, but other people tend to think he's just whack in the head or on some hard-core drugs. Darren is extremely ridiculous when it comes to sense of humor, as we established, but so are most of his friends. What they do in their spare time is dress up like girls or sailors or deer or dictators and do stupid skits and raps and put them online. He hasn't done anything since he's been back to school, he only does it when he goes home for the summer holidays, but plenty of people at the school find his skits amusing and he's attracted a lot of girls, much to his own horror.
DARREN THE WANNABE
Darren wants nothing more than to be a jack ass. The only thing keeping him from that is that most of them don't understand his sense of humor, and he doesn't want to eat 10,000 pounds of ketchup or light his crotch on fire. He does like to call people and pretend he is them from the future, try to have phone sex with telemarketers, or pretend to plot robberies or murders in very public places, but that's really about it. He also doesn't like to jump off of shit, so he's probably not the best fit for that kind of thing. He also really doesn't like the fakeness of scene girls, though he shouldn't be one to talk. Any bitch-sleeper with plastic hair ornaments is definately on Darren's hate-list. Still, he tries as hard as he can to make friends with them.
DARREN: THE TRUTH
Darren is actually very loving once you get to know him, but that also means he can be very clingy. He's a sweet boy, but he can get ticked off very easily by people. He's not closed-minded, trust me, he gets enough of that directed at himself, but he's somewhat intolerant of different types of people (scenesters), so he tries to distance himself from them...usually. If he didn't want to be a jackass so bad, staying away from scene queens would probably be easier. He knows that eventually he's going to have to make friends with them someday, so he figures now is the best time to start making strides.
DARREN THE ARTIST
Darren has been into percussion for as long as he can remember. He occasionally fantasises about being the bad-ass crazy shirtless drummer in some die-hard screamo band, but who doesn't? That could probably happen, except Darren really hates screamo. What he can actually see himself doing is wearing a suit and sitting behind a mellow band like The Shins and tapping away lightly at a cymbol. Poor Darren. Darren's also into painting, sculpting, or really anything you do with your hands. He doesn't draw, but he does paint abstract things. He also likes to find crap like bicycle wheels and giant legos and glue it together and call it art. His teachers just eat it up, but he doesn't see what the big deal is, honestly. He's just Darren.
Hobbies:
- science, if you can consider it a hobby
- working out
- football and lacrosse
- improv and sketch comedy
- trying to get people to like him
- staring at the tv for hours on end
- smoking marijuana
- guy-hunting
- looking snappish
- reading Shakespeare
- drinking black coffee
- painting
- percussian
- drinking expensive red wine
- smoking cigarettes
- watching indie films
Likes:
- science of all types
- working out
- football and lacrosse
- improv comedy
- his sister
- his parents
- marijuana
- guys who don't act like girls
- looking snappish
- Shakespeare
- black coffee
- really good comedy
- percussian
- expensive red wine
- cigarettes
- indie films
Dislikes:
- being told off
- conservatives
- closed-minded people
- crying
- people who are happy all the time
- people who lie for attention
- feeling weak
- snobs
- illiterate people, who are illiterate because they choose to be
- people who think they are absolutely the shit
- "perfect" people
- people who dub themselves "normal"
- his aunt
- whiners
- having to deal with crying people
- the southern united states
History:[/u]
Personal History:
AGE 0
Darren was born May the twenty-ninth while at a hospital in Vancouver. He was a small baby, six pounds and 7 ounces. He was born right on the due-date, but almost in the lift on the way to the room. He was generally a quiet baby, and never really cried and usually slept pretty well, but he was an active baby when he was awake, rolling and kicking and basically just freaking out on the floor. Now, he tells people he hard-core danced when he was little, just to impress them.
AGES 2-5
Darren was always a confused child. He liked to run around, but often ran into things because he never payed attention to wear he was going. When he was two years old, his sister Charley was born, and he often liked to poke and prod her and use her as a source of entertainment. Eventually he got bored of that, so he liked to carry her around in the washbin and leave her places for their parents to find. At age four, he first started showing interest in sports by taking up soccer in his backyard. His father signed him up for a recreational team, and he fell in love with the sport. When he started preschool, he liked to hang out with girls and play house. He was usually an abusive father, throwing pots and pans at them from the play kitchen set. Then they'd yell at him, and he'd go out and play soccer with the older boys, who were never happy to let him play, but always gave in toward the end when he was better than all of them.
AGES 6-10
In primary school, Darren proved to be very intelligent, but had a problem sitting still. After testing and testing, they only found out that he'd much rather be playing sports than sitting in class. It was affecting his schoolwork, so they rearranged his schedule and gave him a P.E. class ever day, an art class and a music class (where he first learned to play percussian) so he would have an easier time focusing in class. As it turns out, Darren was totally awesome at percussian. At the time, he probably just thought that it was great that pounding on shit could make people be so proud of him, but really, it was the start of his future as a percussionist. In art, he started painting. He often got frusterated because he couldn't make anything realistic, so he took the slobs-and-globs approach that abstract-happy teachers love. He's improved considerably since then, but still favors abstract way over realism.
AGES 11-13
Darren started middle school when he was eleven, and was introduced to lacrosse the same year. He made the junior soccer team his first and second years, and the premier team the third, before he went to high school to play for the premier team there. One of the guys on his soccer team was talking about what he did for the spring sports season, which was play lacrosse. Darren was interested and started playing pick-up games with his friends. Eventually, he grew better, and made the junior team (as a benchwarmer) in sixth grade. He's improved considerably and now plays on the premier team as a starter. These ages was where he also started asking out a lot of girls and "discovering" himself.
AGE 14
When Darren started high school, he was immediatley exposed to the complete homophobia of the high school sports teams. At first, he was somewhat afraid to try out, but then it dawned on him that if nobody knew he was gay, it wouldn't matter. He made the varsity soccer team his freshman year, that fall, and made a couple new friends on the team. But in the springtime, when rumors started circling around that Darren was gay, people stopped talking to him on the teams because they were afraid that he had a crush on them. Like he would. Anyway, that really affected him more than it should've, and he screwed up his tryouts and only ended up making freshman lacrosse that year. He was pissed, and vowed to do the best he could to make varsity next year. Eventually, the coaches saw his improvement and bumped him up to JV, but he still wasn't satisfied. The kids on the team were way too asshole for his taste. The tennis team was better, because it was small and intimate and everyone was way more accepting, so freshman year he made JV tennis and a whole bunch of new friends.
AGE 15
Darren's sophomore year was so much better than his freshman year. Over the summer, he finally came out to his mom, who decided to get all ridiculous and have a party, but that's not important. What is important, is that he also adopted an if-you-don't-like-me-than-fuck-you kind of attitude, and people actually started leaving him alone. This year, he was able to make varsity lacrosse, and people actually started to fear him. The badass boys thought he was cool, except for the fact that he spent way too much time in the art room. At this point, Darren also figured that it would be much more fun to make surrealist nature scenes than anything, so he started doing that.
AGE 16-PRESENT
Junior year for Darren was the best so far. He finally made varsity tennis for the first time, became captain of the soccer team, and made starting position for the lacrosse team. After accomplishing all this, Darren unearthed (no pun intended) yet another passion: environmental and life biology. Just the whole idea of evolution is incredible to him, and he wants to study it when he goes off to college. When he was a junior, he kind of stopped painting and making sculptures, his only art projects just to pass his art classes. Art just stopped being interesting to him, but music didn't. He still plays percussion in concert band, marching band, and jazz band. He thinks that makes him somewhat of a loser, but he really doesn't care, because he's a drummer, and drummers are always badasses. He toyed with the idea of wearing war paint on his face, but then decided against it because it would make him look kind of stupid.
FUTURE
Darren's dream is to go to Brown and study evolutionary biology, but is also considering Bard for the music program. Maybe he'd even get back into art. Anyway, Darren's very proud of his well-rounded-individualness, what with him doing good in sciences, arts, and sports. He doesn't seem like jackass material, but would love nothing more than to do that too. The only thing is, it might affect his future. Will it? We don't know. Darren doesn't know either.
Family: Darren has both of his parents, Nigel Harold van der Wood and Blair Cassius van der Wood. He also has two sisters, Charley Cassius van der Wood, age fifteen, and Tory Krystin van der Wood, age eleven. Charley attends a boarding school in England, and Tory attends private school back home in Vancouver.
Anything Important We Need To Know?: Naw.
Other:[/u]
RP Sample:
Any Last Words?: I just hope it's good enough. [/size]
Name: Miranda
Age: Fifteen
How Long Have You Been RPing?: About two years.
Contact?: Just PM. But my AIM is war ballistics.
Your Character:[/u][/size]
Basics
Full Name: Darren Gideon van der Wood
Age: Seventeen
Grade: Senior.
Marital Status: Single.
Appearance:[/u]
Physical Appearance:
THE MANY FACES OF DARREN
Well, he's really only got one face, but it is rather pretty. Darren has that sort of boyish charm to him. Maybe it's his young demeanor, maybe it's his uncooperative hair, or maybe it's just that he plays so many sports, but he looks incredibly young for his age. Darren doesn't care much for shaving, nor does he care much for having a beard, however, so you'll usually find him with a fair amount of stubble on his face. He has the shiny type of all-American blue eyes, except he's not American so nobody's really sure where they came from. His hair is goldish and usually doesn't do what he tells it to, so he has to keep it somewhat short or it'll get freakishly out of hand.
DARREN v.2.0
Darren's grandfather on his mother's side was also named Darren, but the two couldn't be more different. Darren 1.0, as he likes to call him, was a large, bulky man who went to a state university and slept with a lot of women. Gross. Darren's more the type who wants to go to a small, private college. He's already starting to work on his applications to Brown, Bard, and Beloit. B seems to be trendy here. With that aside, Darren doesn't have quite the bulk of his grandfather. He stands at six-feet even, but is incredibly skinny.
THE LOCKS
"My hair is a bitch," I'm sure you'll here him say on more than one occassion. Darren's hair is thick and floppy and he can never make it cooperate, no matter how many Bedhead products he uses. He's convinced that those products only sell because the containers are rad, but he can't stop buying them anyway. Eventually he figured it would just be easier to let his hair do its own thing, and when he does do something with it, he usually uses the strongest hair-glue he can find and makes it look purposefully messy. He thinks that makes him look very studly and hot, but everyone else probably thinks otherwise.
Clothing Style:
DARREN THE FASHION QUEEN
Even though Darren is male, he does make sure he looks presentable, but not so much as a stereotypical gay person, or a scenester. Yuck. No, Darren's very simple when it comes to clothes. You'll often find him in just jeans or a plain tee-shirt, but he often likes jeans that are gray or ripped for some originality. He doesn't have any piercings or makeup, he thinks that it just looks ridiculous, especially when people have one ear pierced. He's not closed-minded, he doesn't care if other people dress like that, he's just possitive that he's not going to. He owns a couple of suit jackets that he'll wear if he wants to dress his outfit up, but that's about it. He's a very jeans-and-a-t-shirt kind of guy, which is good because when he's famous, he's going to have to wear logo-less shirts when on t.v. He often wears band shirts of bands he really likes, and sometimes bands he totally hates just to impress people. Darren's somewhat vain, obviously, and probably somewhat fake, too, but you can't really blame him after he's never been in a real relationship and that's all he wants out of life. He will, on occassion, wear skinny jeans, because he wants nothing more than to fit in with the trendy kids.
Any markings/scars/tattoos/piercings?: Naw.
Picture:
Personality:
Personality:
DARREN THE 'HOMOFAGGOT'
In school, there are always boys, particularly the real athletic ones, who engage in a never-ending game of shoving each other and saying, "Who you calling faggot, homo?" which is followed up by a, "Who you callin' homo, faggot?" and so on and so forth. But what happens when you happen to be really athletic, but also said "homofaggot"? Well, that's where you get Darren van der Wood. It's rare in today's society that you get a "real man" type who happens to be homosexual and doesn't care much about fashion besides looking slightly presentable and not smelling disgusting. If he told you he was gay you'd often assume he was joking, seeing as Darren made the premier lacrosse and soccer teams at his school since third year. (He also made the junior teams his first and second years). He's an incredible athlete, so one would assume he can't possibly be gay, right? Well, not quite. Darren is attracted to the type of guys who actually act like guys, he can't stand guys in tight pants or guys who talk with a fake lisp. It's ridiculous. You'd also think he'd get distracted in games, but believe it or not, gay people are horny just as much as straight people, so obviously, not all the time. Besides, all of the boys at school would much rather engage in a game of "homofaggot" than concentrate on their sports. So Darren figures it's just easier to let them think he's straight and be done with it.
DARREN THE STUD
In his middle years of school, Darren was completely convinced that you needed a girlfriend to be a boy. Nearly every week he had a new catch, and gathered his reputation as a very studly guy. However, no matter how many girls he brought home, he wasn't attracted to any of them. Well, actually, he was attracted to one, but that was only personality-wise. Most of the girls in the lower years thought that if you had a boyfriend, you had to act like a slut, and then they got all upset when Darren wasn't 'turned on' by their ridiculous ways of dressing and ass-shaking menuevers. In his fifth year, Darren finally came to terms with himself and stopped dating girls, though he refuses to look for guys until he knows one who is gay and attracted to him. He doesn't want to humiliate himself.
DARREN THE SPORTSMAN
Darren is just about the ultimate sportsman. He doesn't hunt (that's unconventional), but he does fish, camp with his dad, play lacrosse and soccer, and pretty much any other sport that involves going toward a goal and scoring besides American football. Oh, and tennis. He plays tennis. Since his first year he's been working out, and though he's incapable of building muscle bulk, that really doesn't mean anything because all of his strength is compacted into his smaller frame. He tends to do well as a forward position because he can run fast and people don't assume he's all that good because he's smaller than many of the guys on the team.
DARREN THE COMEDIAN
Though his sister Charley may be somewhat 'funnier' than Darren, it's just because she has a more mature sense of humor. Darren tends to laugh more at things that are so ridiculous and so absurd that few people find them funny at all. Charley usually laughs at Darren's stuff, but other people tend to think he's just whack in the head or on some hard-core drugs. Darren is extremely ridiculous when it comes to sense of humor, as we established, but so are most of his friends. What they do in their spare time is dress up like girls or sailors or deer or dictators and do stupid skits and raps and put them online. He hasn't done anything since he's been back to school, he only does it when he goes home for the summer holidays, but plenty of people at the school find his skits amusing and he's attracted a lot of girls, much to his own horror.
DARREN THE WANNABE
Darren wants nothing more than to be a jack ass. The only thing keeping him from that is that most of them don't understand his sense of humor, and he doesn't want to eat 10,000 pounds of ketchup or light his crotch on fire. He does like to call people and pretend he is them from the future, try to have phone sex with telemarketers, or pretend to plot robberies or murders in very public places, but that's really about it. He also doesn't like to jump off of shit, so he's probably not the best fit for that kind of thing. He also really doesn't like the fakeness of scene girls, though he shouldn't be one to talk. Any bitch-sleeper with plastic hair ornaments is definately on Darren's hate-list. Still, he tries as hard as he can to make friends with them.
DARREN: THE TRUTH
Darren is actually very loving once you get to know him, but that also means he can be very clingy. He's a sweet boy, but he can get ticked off very easily by people. He's not closed-minded, trust me, he gets enough of that directed at himself, but he's somewhat intolerant of different types of people (scenesters), so he tries to distance himself from them...usually. If he didn't want to be a jackass so bad, staying away from scene queens would probably be easier. He knows that eventually he's going to have to make friends with them someday, so he figures now is the best time to start making strides.
DARREN THE ARTIST
Darren has been into percussion for as long as he can remember. He occasionally fantasises about being the bad-ass crazy shirtless drummer in some die-hard screamo band, but who doesn't? That could probably happen, except Darren really hates screamo. What he can actually see himself doing is wearing a suit and sitting behind a mellow band like The Shins and tapping away lightly at a cymbol. Poor Darren. Darren's also into painting, sculpting, or really anything you do with your hands. He doesn't draw, but he does paint abstract things. He also likes to find crap like bicycle wheels and giant legos and glue it together and call it art. His teachers just eat it up, but he doesn't see what the big deal is, honestly. He's just Darren.
Hobbies:
- science, if you can consider it a hobby
- working out
- football and lacrosse
- improv and sketch comedy
- trying to get people to like him
- staring at the tv for hours on end
- smoking marijuana
- guy-hunting
- looking snappish
- reading Shakespeare
- drinking black coffee
- painting
- percussian
- drinking expensive red wine
- smoking cigarettes
- watching indie films
Likes:
- science of all types
- working out
- football and lacrosse
- improv comedy
- his sister
- his parents
- marijuana
- guys who don't act like girls
- looking snappish
- Shakespeare
- black coffee
- really good comedy
- percussian
- expensive red wine
- cigarettes
- indie films
Dislikes:
- being told off
- conservatives
- closed-minded people
- crying
- people who are happy all the time
- people who lie for attention
- feeling weak
- snobs
- illiterate people, who are illiterate because they choose to be
- people who think they are absolutely the shit
- "perfect" people
- people who dub themselves "normal"
- his aunt
- whiners
- having to deal with crying people
- the southern united states
History:[/u]
Personal History:
AGE 0
Darren was born May the twenty-ninth while at a hospital in Vancouver. He was a small baby, six pounds and 7 ounces. He was born right on the due-date, but almost in the lift on the way to the room. He was generally a quiet baby, and never really cried and usually slept pretty well, but he was an active baby when he was awake, rolling and kicking and basically just freaking out on the floor. Now, he tells people he hard-core danced when he was little, just to impress them.
AGES 2-5
Darren was always a confused child. He liked to run around, but often ran into things because he never payed attention to wear he was going. When he was two years old, his sister Charley was born, and he often liked to poke and prod her and use her as a source of entertainment. Eventually he got bored of that, so he liked to carry her around in the washbin and leave her places for their parents to find. At age four, he first started showing interest in sports by taking up soccer in his backyard. His father signed him up for a recreational team, and he fell in love with the sport. When he started preschool, he liked to hang out with girls and play house. He was usually an abusive father, throwing pots and pans at them from the play kitchen set. Then they'd yell at him, and he'd go out and play soccer with the older boys, who were never happy to let him play, but always gave in toward the end when he was better than all of them.
AGES 6-10
In primary school, Darren proved to be very intelligent, but had a problem sitting still. After testing and testing, they only found out that he'd much rather be playing sports than sitting in class. It was affecting his schoolwork, so they rearranged his schedule and gave him a P.E. class ever day, an art class and a music class (where he first learned to play percussian) so he would have an easier time focusing in class. As it turns out, Darren was totally awesome at percussian. At the time, he probably just thought that it was great that pounding on shit could make people be so proud of him, but really, it was the start of his future as a percussionist. In art, he started painting. He often got frusterated because he couldn't make anything realistic, so he took the slobs-and-globs approach that abstract-happy teachers love. He's improved considerably since then, but still favors abstract way over realism.
AGES 11-13
Darren started middle school when he was eleven, and was introduced to lacrosse the same year. He made the junior soccer team his first and second years, and the premier team the third, before he went to high school to play for the premier team there. One of the guys on his soccer team was talking about what he did for the spring sports season, which was play lacrosse. Darren was interested and started playing pick-up games with his friends. Eventually, he grew better, and made the junior team (as a benchwarmer) in sixth grade. He's improved considerably and now plays on the premier team as a starter. These ages was where he also started asking out a lot of girls and "discovering" himself.
AGE 14
When Darren started high school, he was immediatley exposed to the complete homophobia of the high school sports teams. At first, he was somewhat afraid to try out, but then it dawned on him that if nobody knew he was gay, it wouldn't matter. He made the varsity soccer team his freshman year, that fall, and made a couple new friends on the team. But in the springtime, when rumors started circling around that Darren was gay, people stopped talking to him on the teams because they were afraid that he had a crush on them. Like he would. Anyway, that really affected him more than it should've, and he screwed up his tryouts and only ended up making freshman lacrosse that year. He was pissed, and vowed to do the best he could to make varsity next year. Eventually, the coaches saw his improvement and bumped him up to JV, but he still wasn't satisfied. The kids on the team were way too asshole for his taste. The tennis team was better, because it was small and intimate and everyone was way more accepting, so freshman year he made JV tennis and a whole bunch of new friends.
AGE 15
Darren's sophomore year was so much better than his freshman year. Over the summer, he finally came out to his mom, who decided to get all ridiculous and have a party, but that's not important. What is important, is that he also adopted an if-you-don't-like-me-than-fuck-you kind of attitude, and people actually started leaving him alone. This year, he was able to make varsity lacrosse, and people actually started to fear him. The badass boys thought he was cool, except for the fact that he spent way too much time in the art room. At this point, Darren also figured that it would be much more fun to make surrealist nature scenes than anything, so he started doing that.
AGE 16-PRESENT
Junior year for Darren was the best so far. He finally made varsity tennis for the first time, became captain of the soccer team, and made starting position for the lacrosse team. After accomplishing all this, Darren unearthed (no pun intended) yet another passion: environmental and life biology. Just the whole idea of evolution is incredible to him, and he wants to study it when he goes off to college. When he was a junior, he kind of stopped painting and making sculptures, his only art projects just to pass his art classes. Art just stopped being interesting to him, but music didn't. He still plays percussion in concert band, marching band, and jazz band. He thinks that makes him somewhat of a loser, but he really doesn't care, because he's a drummer, and drummers are always badasses. He toyed with the idea of wearing war paint on his face, but then decided against it because it would make him look kind of stupid.
FUTURE
Darren's dream is to go to Brown and study evolutionary biology, but is also considering Bard for the music program. Maybe he'd even get back into art. Anyway, Darren's very proud of his well-rounded-individualness, what with him doing good in sciences, arts, and sports. He doesn't seem like jackass material, but would love nothing more than to do that too. The only thing is, it might affect his future. Will it? We don't know. Darren doesn't know either.
Family: Darren has both of his parents, Nigel Harold van der Wood and Blair Cassius van der Wood. He also has two sisters, Charley Cassius van der Wood, age fifteen, and Tory Krystin van der Wood, age eleven. Charley attends a boarding school in England, and Tory attends private school back home in Vancouver.
Anything Important We Need To Know?: Naw.
Other:[/u]
RP Sample:
There was just something about smooth jazz that got Darren’s toes a-tappin’ and his fingers a-snappin’, figuratively, of course. He grew up listening to irritatingly loud would-be classic rock, which he could never really classify as ‘classic’ because it was distasteful and uncultured, usually involving a cross-dressing front man with tons of face paint and leopard-skin tights freaking out with his band mates randomly pounded on instruments. The only thing worse than that, Darren decided, was 80’s hair bands. Everyone knows that there’s no worse band out there than Skid Row.
Darren had just been in a fight with his parents over his history grade. Ew. Why he was supposed to care about the Bay of Pigs invasion or Mikhail Gorbachev, he did not know. His sister, Charley, was usually good with this kind of crap, but she was away at boarding school in England and was too busy chatting up British boys, dancing in a sophisticated little black dress at a punk show that she clearly was too young to be at, or staring lazily off into space and swilling champagne at a snooty debutante party she was supposed to be ‘appearing at’ or some other weird shit. That was why Darren looked up to his sister, even if she was two years younger than him. Charley had such a badass demeanor while still managing to look completely sophisticated. As her older brother, that scared the hell out of Darren, but he secretly wished he could channel some of her energy for himself. The most badass sophisticate thing Darren had ever done was rent a tux and return it two weeks late. Just thinking about Charley made his stomach hurt. He knew he was supposed to be annoyed by or even hate his younger sister, (it was in the male code) but Darren and Charley had used to be the most insane tag team before she’d been shipped off and Darren, being unable to handle it, moved out and transferred schools. He fingered the black LG Chocolate phone in the pocket of his long, black coat. In his mind he debated calling her, but gave in and pulled it out of his pocket completely. Last time he had tried to call her, you could practically smell the hash from the phone, and he was positive he could hear a couple of guys in the background. Perhaps he’d have better luck this time.
As Darren swiftly moved his thumb to the contacts list, and then down to the C’s for Charley, a barman walked by and set a mug on the table filled with steaming Irish coffee and topped with tons of whipped cream. Darren nodded a thank-you, wondering if the waiter thought it was weird that he was spending his time by himself in ritzy clubs. Darren usually cared what impression he gave to anyone, even if it was just a waiter he’d probably never see again, unless he happened to come back here, to this exact table, at the exact same time on the exact same day of the week. This time, however, Darren was too busy wondering whether or not his sister would pick up the phone.
On the sixth ring, she finally did. “Yeah, what?” she asked, sounding kind of annoyed. It filled Darren with joy just to hear her voice. “Charley, hey!” he cried, hardly bothering to keep his voice down, even though he was attracting stares of other customers.
His sister’s voice softened. “Oh, how’ve you been?” she asked, sounding quite a bit warmer than she had before, even though her voice was a bit muffled. Darren figured she was probably smoking cigarettes and playing cards with people in her dorm; otherwise she wouldn’t have answered her phone.
“Good, good. It’s really nice here. There are some really cute guys. You’d like it,” she giggled. Darren smiled, even though it was the same response she gave every single time he phoned her. Still, familiarity always made him feel secure. Charley went on to explain about some art expo she was going to attend. Darren would love it, apparently, but he wasn’t in England so he really couldn’t go, now could he? He took note that his sister’s English accent had gotten considerably more noticeable now that she’d been there longer. Give it a little time, and he might not even recognize her voice at all.
Darren sighed as they signed off, Charley vowing to ‘give him a ring’ when she had the time, even though they both knew that she wouldn’t and she wouldn’t.
He sighed again. Something about saying goodbye always made Darren want to cry. Everything that made things seem final made him sad. Darren wasn’t much of an emotional person: that was something he had in common with his sister. He hated being around people who were crying and feeling like he had to console them or some crap like that, but that didn’t stop Darren from wanting to shed a few tears when he was alone and no one could see him.
He sipped his now-lukewarm Irish coffee and let a few equally lukewarm tears trickle down his face, setting down his coffee drink to wipe them with the sleeve of his coat. He felt like an idiot. He shouldn’t be crying. Crying was for wimps and nerds, not guys who were captains of the soccer team or badass drummers, and definitely not guys who were Real Men. Darren’s dad had always put an emphasis on being a Real Man. Real Men ate meat, and played sports, and got lots of women, but didn’t show emotion in public EVER. He sighed. Darren would never be a Real Man, not even if he tried. He tried again, then opened a half-empty pack of Marlboro Smoothes and put one in his mouth, lighting it with a monogrammed lighter his dad had gotten him for his birthday. Yeah, Real Man. Real Ritzy Snob Man or something like that. He took a long drag on his cigarette and tapped the dwindling ashes into an ashtray.
That was when he heard voices. No, not inside his head, that was for crazy people. But other teenage voices, sounding like people he knew from school, but couldn’t put his finger on. They were laughing, great. Darren only hoped that they wouldn’t A. recognize him, or B. realize that he’d been crying. Getting caught doing either would be social suicide, and Darren wasn’t quite ready to die.
Any Last Words?: I just hope it's good enough. [/size]
