FT: Nathaniel Katz, the Straw Pig of the Three Little Pigs
nate katz
GENRE: Original interpretation of fairy tales; in specific for this, an old English piece of folklore.
ARCHETYPE: Jewish frat boy.
REPRESENTATIVE JOURNAL ENTRIES: ONE
REPRESENTATIVE ROLEPLAY LOGS: Forthcoming!
PERSPECTIVE ESSAYS: Forthcoming!
NAME: Nathaniel Levi Katz
DATE OF BIRTH, AGE: 18 April 1989, 18 as of 11 March 2008
AFFILIATIONS: Pentamerone, Columbia University, Alpha Epislon Pi, Piglandia
PROFESSION: First year undergraduate student, Columbia University, with plans to major in Architecture, with a possible double major in History and Theory of Architecture. As testament to Nate's gray matter, a lot of the general education requirements normally filled within a Columbia student's inaugural year were safely covered with a slew of high Advanced Placement scores, so he's already enrolled in beginning studio courses for his major that are normally opened up for an individual on the sophomore level. When he's not studying or hanging out at the AEPi house, Nate works a few hours as a clerk at The Family Jewels, a vintage clothing and music store on West 23rd Street. He mainly does it for the discounts on clothing and vinyls, which he collects with a vengeance.
PERSONALITY: Nathaniel Katz doesn't look all that rambunctious at first glance. In class, he's not all that talkative in discussion, and at the beginnings of a party, he's very much the poster-boy for the mild-mannered, awkward individual who probably bought his way in with booze money or smuggled Smirnovs. Certainly, Nate's a little reserved when he first meets a person on a face-to-face, tangible playing field; he still subscribes to the belief that you should give somebody a firm and healthy handshake when introducing oneself, let the other dominate the conversation in order to glean the character of a person, and regardless of whether you just met a big, fat jerk or a great candidate for the title of "drinking buddy," you should always treat him or her as if you might be best friends. Survival tactics from the swingset-and-locker years are still heavily ingrained in his muscle memory, and so most of the authority figures in his life are pretty convinced that Nate Katz is a charming young man who couldn't hurt a fly, much less survive a keg stand.
For anyone that knows better (read: Malachi and Skip, the entirety of Alpha Episilon Pi, anyone who reads Nate's Compendium entries), it's quite clear that Nate Katz is the farthest thing from mild-mannered or dry-humored. He was probably one of the Fall 2007 pledges that was most willing to do anything and everything retarded in order to earn his good graces at AEPi, and his antics never quite stopped. Nate's never been one for seriousness, really, and those closest to him can attest to his preference to think up grandiose and utterly ridiculous plans to do whilst in the throes of boredom. He's the boy that has aspirations for Internet fame or infamy, depending on whatever comes first, and is pretty sure that he'll do it by strapping on a pair of rollerskates and reenacting the Luke-Vader sabre fight at the end of A New Hope sooner or later. He's hard-pressed to say no to something that is, by his definition of the idea, "crazy entertaining," and will frequently only opt out either by persuasion of those he respects or being hit over the head by a baseball bat.
He doesn't commit to these hijinks because he's a moron, though; if anything, the fact that Nate hasn't been kicked out of Columbia yet due to his preponderance for idiotic escapades is a testament to his intellect. He thrives on obscure references mostly because he possess an excellent photographic memory, and if he's capable of putting effort and mind into the motions, Nate could quite possibly be one of those kids that wow even Columbia professors with the magnitude of what he could bring to courses and the learning environment. Yet, the one thing that the Straw Pig gave Nate an abundance of was sloth. Well, perhaps "sloth" is an inappropriate word for Nate's current condition; it's not as if he's loathe to exercise, nor is he a shut in, as is displayed by his fervent activity within AEPi. It's just that Nate's motivated to do all the wrong things, more or less. Help his friends build a gigantic slingshot? Yeah! Craft an elaborate prank on some jerk that picked on a pretty girl from his Spanish class? You bet Nate's on that! But get a head start on his mock-up of a three-story for Friday's studio? ... well, it's just Wednesday now, right, so he totally has all tomorrow evening. The twisted thing is that Nate's pretty self-aware of his laziness, and he's paranoid as hell that he's going to have to defer to a state college in Pennsylvania if he doesn't get his act together, so he'll swing in between trying to fight against the urge to do a particularly good-looking last-minute job on an assignment and actually investing the time in making a product that speaks about Nate's general abilities. So far, the jury's out as to whether it's a losing battle.
If there's one thing in Nate's favor for staying at Columbia, it's a personality trait that's just slightly stronger than his laziness: loyalty. Everything from high school until the present has been pushed by Nate's fervent, dogged determination to keep his word and not leave his friends. It's this quality that made him a shoe-in pledge for AEPi (other than the utter eagerness to do stupid shit that the fraternity is particularly fond of participating in), and definitely a reason why he's earned the reputation within his circle of friends, however small it might be, as a guy that one can turn to if the going gets a little rough. His family may not be particularly rich (smart with money, yes, but not rich), but Nate doesn't hesitate in helping a friend in need, even if his efforts may be, at times, flawed. Not that he'd ever mention it to you unless he was up-to-his-eyes piss drunk, but Nate really values the concept of brotherhood and friendship, partially out of his own experiences as a child as much as through the benefits his Tale reaped from such kindness throughout time. So, he gives back, and that? Is that.
There's a few more reasons as to why one might keep Nate around all buddy-buddy, over-eagerness to help you out of a rut aside. He's pretty relaxed, all that mad-cap humor aside, and is much more prone for following, if you're the particular type of person who's into megalomania. Although he likes doing things, he's just as comfortable hanging out and reading a book in one's general area, or maybe playing some chords on the stoop - er, if you're into that kind of thing. He doesn't really find himself getting up in too much of a fuss about things, mostly because he's seen what stress and frustration does courtesy of his helpful example of a mother, and so finds that unless someone's fucked up one of his collections major, there's not too much to get in a tizzy about. It's impressive shit that gets Nate Katz all upset and cranky, and he finds that in the end, praying and all that weird "religious" shit is an easy remedy to getting uber-tense and riled up against whatever's about to blow up in his face.
Or, you know, just get straight out pissed as fuck. Nate figures it's whatever comes first.
LIKES: Original Star Wars, emergency sets of Legos, vinyl records, accompanying his nonsense songs with guitar, shows cancelled way before their prime, Netflix, Alpha Epsilon Pi, his bros, avoiding hair cuts, running in Central Park, Xbox Live, fragging, e-comics, Something Awful Goonery, boobies, getting discounts at work, poker nights, reorganizing his Magic: The Gathering cards out of nostalgia, MC Chris, the taste of certain cigars, the word "crunk," leaving The Perks of Being A Wallflower in public places.
DISLIKES: Prequel Star Wars, deadlines, the pressure to be a perfectionist, having to live in the dorms, not talking to the bros for longer than a week, that funky piss smell in the subway, the look of flannel on women, sporting events, nagging, Covenant snipers, not having the Wii yet, that retarded swim test, slandering Sir Mix-a-Lot, people messing with his lightsabre that are not named 'Skippy' or 'Malachi', cockblockery, your mom, helping a girl buy shoes at the store, Pabst Blue Ribbon.
HISTORY: Joshua Katz and Rachael Spektor's first meeting was something out of a Brat Pack movie; as fellow counselors at the Emma Kaufmann Camp in the early 80s, they not only enjoyed a mutual adoration of athleticism, the outdoors, and fellowship, but also a blossoming friendship under the muggy West Virginian nights as young kids whispered after lights-out in the cabins. Joshua, a native of Cleveland, was studying at Carnegie Mellon as an industrial design student, whereas Rachael, a native of Pittsburgh through and through, was paying for her Doctor of Chiropractic with various jobs through the Jewish Community Center in her neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. Joshua joked after the end of the EKC sessions that it would be easy to find her when school started, and sure enough: first day of Carnegie Mellon's fall semester session and Joshua Katz was spotted at the foot of the Kaufmann Building's steps holding a particularly pathetic bunch of wilted daisies. It would be the start of a long relationship.
The couple's first-born, Nathaniel, was destined for nothing less than preregistration for all the Community Center's sports classes while still in the womb. Of course, Nate had his own ideas; as a toddler, he was more drawn to Sesame Street and messing around with Legos than playing catch in the backyard, and all those swimming lessons by the age of four went pretty much unused as he messed around with dad's old Atari system and snuck in a few episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when it was just him and pops. His mother thought herself something of a medical authority, and so her son's preference for a life of "sloth," as it were, unnerved her - and his father, if not for the ragged destiny of bleeding ears and fervent lectures before the two went to bed alone. Still, all that aside, Nate was a happy and healthy child in all other respects, and so the Katzes were reasonably sated as a result.
Thankfully, sister Hannah was born just as Rachael was about to enroll Nate into tap dancing classes (and Nate's pretty sure that Hannah's convinced that she still owes him something cosmic as a result). At any rate, Hannah proved to be active and sporty enough to get most of the demands for star athlete off of Nate's shoulders, but his childhood was still filled with more sports than the young boy could shake a stick at courtesy of the Community Center. To Nate's pleasure, however, they were things he was much more adept at: soccer, specificially, was his passion, although basketball worked well to fill his winter schedule. His main fondness with the former was mostly linked to his inevitable childhood destiny as the playground punching bag - after all, all that running he did from the meaty fists of his moronic tormentors, and he was practically the Einstein of soccer. Pelé, even!
Being the Einstein of Soccer aside, Nate much preferred the comfortable confines of school, mostly because he didn't have to do much to succeed. Most of the stuff throughout elementary and middle school was pretty fascinating for Nate, but through creative multi-tasking in the middle of free time and simply getting worksheets done in ten minutes' time, he never had to really bring much of school home with him on the bus. After he managed to convince his mother that he was too old for the after-school programs at the JCC, he was the epitome of lactch-key kid: watching Star Wars until the tape was busted; replaying Donkey Kong Country, anything Mario-related, Earthworm Jim, and Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure until his eyes glazed over; and idly making yellow huts out of Legos were weekday afternoon staples for Nate. He'd have the occasional kid over to hang out, but for the most part, Nate was something of an island unto himself. Even classmates more on Nate's level were inclined to think that he was a little... different, and Nate was hard-pressed to disagree.
Of course, it was starting around Nate's own bar mitzvah season when his life became interesting. It was mid-July when an old college friend of his dad's invited the family to drive out to Philadelphia to attend the bat mitzvah of one Sarah Cohen, who turned out to be a girl who might've been prettier than the daylights but had the personality of shriveled peas. Seeing as Nate hadn't quite discovered breasts despite his status as a man at his synagogue, he found himself much more happily occupied with his Game Boy Advance in the back of the reception room. As it happened, so were two other boys who were, for whatever awful reason, also present at this pseudo-stranger's big party. None of the three quite remember what happened first: one of them might've pointed out that Nate was pretty close to going without a certain Pokemon, or the other might've been impressed with his GBA's lighting system, but regardless, the end result was the same. By the end of three hours' time, Nate Katz had managed to become fast friends with Malachi Roth and Skip Blumstein. There were e-mails exchanged, promises of discussing Halo techniques, and vague promises of telephone calls before leaving, presumably to become occasional Internet pen pals for the rest of their days.
As the Katzes drove through pastoral Pennsylvania, it vaguely occured to Nate that his casual relations with Malachi and Skip had been something beyond that of normal boys awkwardly bonding over a shared disinterest of gigantic pink bows of tulle and middle school-era dancing - or, um, it would've if Nate really thought about feelings on a deep level. But it did occur to young Nate that there was something about his afternoon with the two other boys that was pretty cool. It had never occured to him, of course, that anything particularly big (cosmic, even) would be the result; only that he had actually made some decent friends. Besides, all those weird nursery rhyme dreams involving the wolf from the retarded three pigs rhyme were just leading up to wet dreams, right? Right?!
For a while, nothing spectacular did happen, other than the fact that the boys' correspondance became a little more than the occasional e-mail. Nate's fondness with the Internet was already pretty healthy, but when Malachi and Skip had rigged up a chat room on AIM, there were moments when his parents had to pull the plug on the machine and force him to bed. When there was Internet-grounding ("Your muscles will atrophy if you're not careful, Nathaniel Levi Katz, just you watch!"), the boys took to group phone chats in closets when everybody thought their parents were fast asleep. When the three found out that their parents all signed them up for the same summer camp, it was enough for the boys to not shriek like a bunch of girls encountering Hanson for the first time. It'd be a month of hanging out! The outdoors didn't suck too bad, and there'd probably be fire and... fire. Nate was finding his luck to be most fortuitous, but he wasn't the only one. The Atheneum was able to get three Tale visits done in one fell stone, and although the initial meeting was more than a little awkward and involved a lot of Twilight Zone moments, Nate had to admit that it explained a lot of shit. The three of them, the Three Little Pigs? All the irony of finding out that they were reincarnated pork at a Jewish summer camp aside, all the running away from guys with anger management problems and instacamraderie made sense. It was almost as if the girlish gossiping in between his dad's smelly jogging shoes was actually worth something!
Nate arrived at his first year at Allderdice High with a certain amount of self-assurance that he lacked in prior years, and the effects of good friendship and self-discovery (for lack of a better term) were plentiful. He made the soccer team, found a cluster of friends within his classes, and communicated with his fellow Pigs on a regular basis. For a while, Nate found a pretty decent rhythm to his life that even his mother couldn't disagree with: soccer practice in the afternoons and Xbox Live games of Halo 2 with Malachi and Skip in the evenings, and everyone was pleased - well, except for the small thing with his homework issues. Sure, he was clever enough to get through most of his freshman year with his usual work-any-time-but-home methods, but by the time he started to climb up into AP levels, he knew that intellect alone couldn't help him achieve what he needed. There would have to be bringing home coursework and possible essay writing, and it was enough for Nate to consider duelling with the little Tale-induced urge to slap together a half-assed solution to any problem.
Most of the motivation, of course, didn't come from the flesh-and-blood family, vague ambitions to please his parents and own a fancy undergraduate diploma nonwithstanding. Really, the driving force caome from somewhat of a passing mention of Malachi, Skip, and Nate trying to go to the same college. It was all laughs and chickenshit at the beginning, of course: "Sure, let's go to Columbia! We'll hang out, it'll be great!" But then Malachi got in, and there was a little something of a niggling pressure for the sophomore looking ahead in the game. You didn't just decide last-minute to apply to Columbia-fucking-University, after all, and the same went for Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Brown, UPenn, or NYU. So, regardless of Skip's decision (which ended up with a matching acceptance packet to Malachi's the following year), Nate started to focus. There was less Gooning and more passable attempts at studying, shorter chat times in lieu of trying to master the ultimate essay. To say that Nate didn't cheat once or ten times during his years in high school would be a blatant lie, but to say he felt guilty about it would probably be just as inaccurate. Yet, in the face of that shining letterhead informing him of his acceptance into Columbia, it was all worth it.
A semester after his rush into Alpha Episilon Pi and general adjustment into Columbia-life, and Nate's struggling with keeping that procrastination under control. After all, it feels as if he has the ultimate goal already: he's within walking distance of both Malachi and Skip (as retarded as that fucking sounds, he'll be sure to tell you) and he's even in a fucking fraternity, of all things. AEPi was something his father was involved in during his days as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, sure, but by the time Nate was on campus, Malachi was a seasoned member and Skip was enjoying his first year in the house. It was only natural that the littlest Pig fell in line - and just as natural that he's loathe to go back to his dorm at the end of the day for fear of architectural models, English papers, and general seriousness. In Nate's ever-eloquent parlance: fuck that shit now.
GAME(S) PLAYED: fairlytales
STATUS: Active
PLAYED-BY: Michael Cera