IVANOV, UMI

+ her parents met through the peace corps, when her russian-american father was overseas helping a relief effort from the sea of japan earthquake. after a resulting long distance relationship, they moved to nova and started their family.

+ her parents are die-hard do-gooders and over achievers. umi has a brother a few years older than her who became involved in biochemistry as a result. when he was ten he decided to cure cancer. while it might not have worked out for him, hey, he's trying.

+ her parents sort of expected umi to follow in the overseas footsteps and, ideally, help out with the clean water problem in africa. they were big planners. she grew up with english as a first language, with japanese and russian woven in so she was trilingual from a young age. this was incredibly confusing to her pre-school and kindergarden teachers, since she would refer to the same objects in different languages every so often. in high school she took your average, run-of-the-mill spanish classes, and in college her parents rallied her to have a tutor so she'd be fluent. they also tried to have her do an immersion class in spain, but it didn't work out so well.

+ the plane she was on had engine failure and ended up landing not too far from it's departure point, but since then umi has had an insurmountable fear of flying and occasional night terrors of plunging into the ground, sea, a fire explosion or just some sort of infinite blackness.

+ after that, her parents tried to coerce her to study bantu, but not only could umi not grasp it, she refused to ever fly to africa - or anywhere, for that matter.

+ all of this had happened by the time that she was twenty-one. still hoping to appease her parents, she started to pursue nursing and eventually became an rn at a clinic. it's something that she can use all those languages for, too. it's a slow and sometimes sad job, but sometimes it's rewarding for her.

+ she got married when she was twenty-two, and the relationship only lasted three years afterwards. it was lackluster and boring and decayed on it's own. after the divorce, umi was feeling a little lonely and adopted a rottweiler who she named bori. if she's being honest, the dog is better company than her ex-husband ever was.


alias: birdie
last character: screech
faceclaim: [b][i]NARUTO, hinata,[/i][/b] umi ivanov