Elena Maria Morales / AESOP'S ANT.

Dec 19, 2007 17:30



basics.
Name: Elena Maria Morales
Age: 28
Date of Birth: April 25th, 1979
Place of Birth: Mineola, NY
Current Residence: Manhattan
Position with Atheneum: Monitors, calculates dues

Occupation: As a strategic advisor for the Global Wealth Management Group at Morgan Stanley, Elena formulates comprehensive plans for shuffling funds of the extremely wealthy to make them even wealthier. Sometimes she shuffles the funds herself. She works primarily out of the Times Square office, usually with brokers, rarely with front-end clients.
First impression: Just one more judgmental control freak swinging from the middle bars of Wall Street's Type-A jungle gym.

the ant's story.
Fairytale: The Ant, Aesop’s fables

Ability: Elena possesses the gift of earnest plenty; that is, so long as she devotes herself wholeheartedly to any one goal, its output will multiply. Her hard work is transmuted into increase. These rewards are usually monetary ones for the company, but the gift is present in all quantifiable aspects of her life. If she toils over a Roasted Corn and Edamame Salad using a recipe for two, damned if she won’t somehow get a third serving out of it, yet nothing particular happens if she neglectfully nukes a frozen dinner. It takes both effort and perseverance. If she is transferred off a case, or-heaven forbid-takes a long enough vacation, equilibrium is restored, and any gross ability-related surpluses are lost one way or another.

Incarnations: The Ant reincarnates with almost unprecedented instability amongst the tales. Bearing no fixed traits but devotion to industry, s/he really can be born as anyone, and work tirelessly towards any number of goals. Often grimly determined against flights of fancy, the Ant spends less time than usual with fable awareness, and has been known to make it through successive hardworking incarnations without ever reaching that epiphany.

elena's story.
Elena was born on April 25th, 1979, the third child of a prominent intellectual property lawyer and a concert violinist, both native New Yorkers, presently suburbanites. Her birth was entirely unexpected, given that her older brothers were a good thirteen years her senior, but Ernesto and Marina quickly warmed to the idea of welcoming another daughter into the world-and then one more. It could be said that the Morales children came in pairs. However, while their twin sons were identical, their two daughters, born only a year and a half apart, were anything but; her sister was a free spirit, but Elena soon established herself as a deeply sensible child. A good look inside any coloring book of her youth would reveal an early fascination with lines and boundaries. When the twins went to college, and the loss of two rowdy teenagers made their home seem cavernous, her parents finally fulfilled a dream they’d been nursing for the prior twenty years: they moved back into the city.

She and her sister attended high-walled brick private schools in the city through their primary and secondary educations. Elena kept her nose to the grindstone and her hand in the air; between her glasses, her frown, and her GPA, there was little danger of popularity. She thrived under the pressure to succeed. “That’s my girl!” pats on the shoulder spoke louder to her than snickers from classmates--she believed like religion that short-skirted sex kittens and the swaggering pretty boys would be sorry when college hit, they flunked their classes, and their third abortions/coke habits got them disinherited. Elena has absently followed their antics over the years, and it’s only happened once or twice, but it gives her unreasonable satisfaction when someone suffers the consequences of blowing things off. It did even then, but she didn’t yet possess the confidence to square her shoulders and smirk. That didn’t happen until after college.

The college in question was Yale, the major was Economics (originally Linguistics) and the classmates who she didn’t hate, she loved; she had long dreamed of a place where obsessive attention to detail was supported rather than decried. She coped well with being a smaller fish in a larger pond, maintained an admirable class rank, worked terribly hard and reaped measurable results. When she looks back fondly on her college experience, she’s not pining for toga parties or even a very brief engagement to a handsome grad student--she misses living in a fishbowl with clear boundaries and solid objectives, the hardworking homogeneity of a quiet library.

Elena did miss the city, and it was half for this reason-half because of the fallout from that very brief engagement-that she moved back to the comfort of New York for her graduate studies, juggling a part-time stint at an insurance brokerage firm with Business classes at Columbia. She never lived like she was standing at her present location; she lived five-to-ten years in the future. More than in high school or college, she cultivated a taste for reasonable but expensive things. A brief attempt at keeping house with her sister exploded so horribly that both vacated the premises and they still won’t say more than five words to each other, so she split a midtown apartment with (a rotating circle of) like-minded workaholics for three more years, out of grad school, through a year of full-time employment at another insurance brokerage firm, and into a year of employment at her current location.

From her first day at Morgan Stanley, Elena was unable to shake the suspicion that she’d returned to high school. Several years of experience have proven it even worse: business is a high school where you’re graded on popularity as well as results. She just doesn’t have the stomach for the latter. The best she can manage is to not actively antagonize her colleagues, and since getting a hold of some job security, she struggles even with that. It just seems like every project she touches is nudged towards success, and every one that drops her regrets it. That’s half a blessing and half a curse. She’s learned that when people assure her that things won’t go south if she takes a while off, they’re well-intentioned, but they’re wrong.

While Elena might have thought that she could relax once she’d gotten a stable position in the company, nobody in their right might could call her present state relaxing. She has risen industriously through the ranks. She fixed herself a nice apartment in Manhattan. She tries to pretend she’s at all excited about galas for Hispanic business initiatives. Living a productive life of standards and routines, she attends to the same duties at the same times as often as possible, takes her cases home, rolls her eyes at the antics of the Atheneum, nurses resentment and exotic potted plants, and ingests more caffeine than a medium-sized coffee factory.

personality.
Elena Morales lives her life by the steady repetition of two hard-set truths. The first-that hard work will always bring rewards-might have played out well for her, excepting the dread forces of schmoozing and politics, since she has no skill at either. The second is that slackers, sycophants and bullshit artists will always get theirs in the end. Unfortunately, just as often, they get hers. Her credit; her recognition; her grudging envy; sometimes, even her loyalty. She would be much happier in a world where either of her favorite adages was true. Elena doesn’t live in an agrarian meritocracy (though she did, successfully, for several hundred years). She lives in New York City. Though her desperate fury for productivity is no longer society’s golden rule, she’s found enough like-minded workaholics to reinforce her behavior. She’s also resented enough undeserving trust-funders to nurture her neuroses and a quick, cynical tongue. She treats newcomers as though she suspects that they’ll try to make her life harder, and has seen it before, and won’t have any of it now.

She is purposefully small-minded when it comes to getting things done. Her nature compels her towards teamwork, but her personality clashes easily with those of other go-getters, so coworkers may expect regular and firm opposition. Elena doesn’t have problems with authority as a concept; nothing gives her a pleasanter buzz than a well organized and productive hierarchy, though she doesn’t think that she’s ever really seen one. She jealously guards her own competence and looks down at the great unwashed and underqualified, which makes her disinclined to charity. Any perceived laziness on the part of her colleagues is met with quietly rolled eyes and a somewhat louder sigh of martyredness, and for the most part she’s right to act like a victim, because in addition to making a fuss about another person’s neglected duties, she will, in the end, perform them herself. Making sure the slacker knows he’s a bastard is an important, but secondary, task; what’s most important is that things go smoothly.

It goes without saying that Elena takes her job personally. As her career advances, her addiction to being relied upon takes more and more responsibilities to satisfy. She juggles them well, devoted as she is to the church of undisputed success, but such constant stress has taken its toll on her. She knows-hears from an internal drive far stronger than her own-that she mustn’t stop working, but she sometimes pines for unreachable umbrella drinks. She does have occasional dramatic fits, which is what happens when she loses perspective, which is what happens when she cannot take time to separate herself from work, which is what happens when all abandoned tasks seem to suffer for the loss of her.

Sometimes she feels trapped by her own work ethic. Her therapist can’t talk her off of any cases or onto any medication. That she listens to Elena’s constant tirades about work, or exes, or the inefficiency of the universe she lives in means that Elena’s therapist must also be very hardworking. She's been listening to her woes for two and a half years; Elena dropped the old one after a confession that she felt "like an insect" led to the realization that she had been an insect for a couple thousand years, which explained a lot, but hardly fixed her problems.

Elena craves control, or equally, to be controlled by someone whose judgment she trusts implicitly; that was much easier before she learned how few people are worth trusting. She seeks one or the other and nothing else will do. To that end, one of her biggest pet peeves is those who have-but in her opinion, don’t deserve-power over her. She’s left departments because of it. It sets her need for structure against her need for merit-oriented justice, and what is arguably no small dose of personal pride. She is arch, skeptical, and quite sarcastic when pressed, and though a battle of wills can be a stimulating motivational technique, for the most part she finds conflict more stressful than satisfying. Nonetheless, she’s usually in a stalemate with someone or another. Her firm but fragile arrogance just tempts a good knocking-down-there is some sport to messing with brittle people, especially brittle people with tempers. She can be coaxed into explosions, if you judge her well enough.

Nobody can question that she’s one hardworking woman. People can and do question why. Elena likes nothing more than to answer a broad question with a frank answer, but in this case, she's wisely decided to hold off on explaining.

misc.
  • The guest chair in her office is much more comfortable than her own.
  • Is vegetarian, but lactose intolerant, so approximately vegan; honey is the only real dealbreaker.
  • Secret vice: gossip magazines.
  • Has a stock fifteen minute diatribe about the idiocy that is "ferrets as pets".
  • Constantly switches her ringtone between two generic non-song rings, since both irritate her equally.
  • Can function without her glasses, but gets headaches.
  • Wanted to attend Harvard, but was only accepted into Yale. Will never admit this to anyone.
  • Occasionally takes the last cup of coffee without making more, but bitches to high heaven if anyone else does.
  • Spent the better part of the year before last trying to unload a cat her sister left at her apartment (eventually gave it a Morgan Stanley co-worker).
  • Among Aesop's fables, the Ant has been tapped as librarian on more than one occasion; of course, there are also lifetimes (and sequences of lifetimes) when the Ant never realizes its fairytale identity.


  • ooc.
    Name: Jane
    CDJ:
    heymermaid
    AIM: WaffleNinja4092
    YIM: eff_scott_fitzgerald
    e-mail: doomcrayon@gmail.com
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