It's been 10 years now since I've lived in this house. That's a long freaking time.
In those 10 years, I've been all sorts of different people, I've been shy, loud, studious, lazy, a girlfriend, an ex-girlfriend, a baby-sitter, a co-worker, an actress, a politician, a jock and a nerd.

All of those headings were temporary though, one being replaced with another as I evolved, growing and unavoidably changing my mind on who I've wanted to be. I've been very good at changing and the most notable change has been in appearance. I've grown out of a 14 year old gawky girl with braces into a 20 year old 'willowy' (adult-speak for gawky) girl with red in my hair.
Despite all of these changes, physical and otherwise, one title has followed me around for 10 years.
I am, and always will be, Jen Hamilton's friend.

When I was 12 I befriended a sweet, blond soccer playing girl who lived on my street. We were fast friends and became inseparable for 4 or so years. She was and still is an awesome girl, great sense of humor and a good heart. Unfortunately for me, Jen Hamilton is absolutely beautiful.
Gorgeous. Completely breathtaking. So for the next 8 years, I wasn't Desiree. I was 'Jen Hamilton's best friend'. Whoopee.
Now, I'm not the shy type, and am a bit of an ass at times, and from there the nickname developped into 'the funny one', as the 'one of Jen Hamilton's friends' part became silent, or better yet, understood. This was something that I learned to deal with. She was gorgeous, and boys loved her. I was funny. Good for me.

Now, to be honest there was a little hiatus between Jen and myself, as 17 year old girls are a crazy bunch. A rift in our friendship developped and for two years, due to the distance between us, I avoided being associated with her, something which I didn't really notice, until we rekindled the friendship a year ago, and it started up again. A handful of us had gone to see a John Mayer concert. It was great, and we all enjoyed ourselves immensely, and stood around afterwards in the hopes of catching a glimpse of John.

John never emerged, but his band did, and so we sidled up and started chatting up the drummer, and it wasn't long before we noticed that the drummer (who's name I never picked up, as a result of him ignoring me) was no longer talking to us as a group. No no, he was talking to Jen. She was standing in the middle of the group, and the rest of us sort of peeled back, allowing the two of them to converse thoughtfully about god knows what. The rest of us stood there, laughing at the fact that in 8 years of friendship, nothing had really changed. We should introduce ourselves in such a way as to eliminate any confusion...
"Hi, I'm Desiree, that's Joanna and the one in the blue is Heather. The one you're staring at is Jen. She's the hot one and you'll be wanting to talk to her. We'll be over here, smiling politely and waiting to leave."

This whole flashback of bitterness is brought to you by Ryan, the friendly liquor store counter guy who, although Jen wasn't even with us, asked what SHE was doing for New Years.

Here's to 2003. Play safe.

I've gotten into three fights in the past day. And I've lost every single bloody one of them.
I've fought my brother twice, and my best friend once.
My brother is always some skinny chick with enormous breasts, and Kathy is always Santa Claus, and me, I'm a scottish guy.
I figure the reason for my constant ineptitude in online fighting is because I've never had any kind of real-life fighting experience.
Maybe I should start picking fights, at random, with real people.
I've got an excuse that's better than what most people use for justifying getting in a fight..."He hit on my girl", "She's a skank"..." I need to practice so that I can perfect my abilities in order to whomp my brother as some girl in an email-related battle."

Oh yeah, and the whole thing is always done in french.

The length I'll go to avoid studying? Infinite.

I was dead wrong. After further thought I've decided the Eminem movie is more like an Adam Sandler movie. Any Adam Sandler movie. All Adam Sandler movies. When random guy (usually with some kind of speech impediment that makes me want to break things) has to overcome random obstacle to achieve random goal. Formulaic comedy. Horrid, I know, but that's what the Eminem movie is like, minus the comedy. Although having a main character whose name is Cheddar Bob is kind of funny, although if he were animated like Sponge Bob it'd've been a much better flick.

However, this change in opinion does in no way negate my feelings on Emilio Estevez. If the biggest name of your series of movies is the lesser known, inferior actor-brother to CHARLIE SHEEN, then it's time to re-think the franchise.

I'm sorry that I've been so scattered as of late. My promise of regularity was, well, not entirely true, but what can you do?

No really, what can YOU do? Nothing. That's what I thought.

I went to see the Eminem movie yesterday. I find it interesting how substandard movies/tv shows are always nicknamed after their most notable and probably annoying character. Like the Eminem movie, or the Urkel show. Anyway, it wasn't a bad movie. It was kind of like a Mighty Ducks movie, except where all the Mighty Ducks are hardcore rappers, and the national tournament at the end is a hardcore rap-off. And there's a whore in it. I don't recall there being a whore in Mighty Ducks, unless ofcourse you consider what Emilio Estevez calls 'acting', whoring, which isn't too far from the truth. They made THREE of those damn movies. Slut.

Ned taught me many moons ago how to link things. And as my first act of linkage, I'm going to hook y'all up with a great site that makes me smile all the time, especially now during exams. Check out the StrongBad emails for me. Okay Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd link. Homestar Runner. Beautiful! Tell me what you think.
Off to learnin'. How cruel is it to have an exam on the 21st? Very.

"You think you're so smart, but I've seen you naked and I'll probably see you naked again"

Name the song and artist behind these wonderful words, and you win a prize!!!!!
Hint: Oldschool Canadian Goodness

....the things I do to myself.... Part II
I have an exam tomorrow. At 9 in the morning. Since I have yet to master the time thing on the page, I'm going to have to tell you that it's 1 in the morning. And what am I doing?
Well, seeing that I'm neither studying nor sleeping, I'll accept several answers:
A) Screwing myself over
B) adding a level of difficulty, that being 'sleep deprived and generally uneducated'
C) Attaining new heights in being a big stupid lameass.

I know that this is a big exam. I know it'll be tough, and not only that, I really respect my profs, and would really like to blow their heads back with my boundless knowledge of Philosophy. This won't happen. My knowledge knows bound. Big huge bounds.
Sufficed to say I'm in a dilly of a pickle.

Actually, no I'm not. It shouldn't be too bad. And it's that exact attitude that has lead me to this place. A place where I will do practically ANYTHING (read: voluntarily change the cat litter) other than study. A place where I find myself uttering 'hey, it's only 25% of my final mark'. A place where, try as I might. I just don't care.

I'm frightened by my own ambivalence...but not so frightened as to actually do anything. That's what's good about ambivalence.

Don't Care.

....the things I do to myself....

I just spent two straight hours of potential study time, tearing my house and mother's car apart, searching desparately for my wallet. Now, I very rarely lose things, but I am often unsure of their locations, so I knew that I'd find it. I knew the last moment I had it, and I knew it was either in the house, or in the car. I just had to outwit the wallet, for I knew that for every ingenious new place I thought up for its potential location, it would dematerialize from that spot and then rematerialize somewhere new and more proposterous than the first place. Where did I find it? This is pretty good.

I found my wallet, in a shoebox, under a stack of books that I haven't looked at since the summer of grade twelve in a corner of my room that is squished between my closet and my desk. This is the corner of my room where bad books go to die. And, of course, the least likely place for my wallet to be, so obviously, the first place I should have looked.
Inside this shoebox, was a recorder (from grade 6 music class) a note a recieved from one James Greenshields (from grade 9 math class) and a certificate of merit from a summer camp that I attended. Tucked in amongst this motley crew of my past, was my wallet. Which, by the way, contains every thing I have to prove that I exist. Student card, International student card, Health Card, Bank Card, Social Insurance Card, and frequent Pita-buyer card. (listed in ascending order of importance, least to most.)

The procedure for me finding lost things goes as follows.
A) Find it
B) Reason out how it got to the place where I found it.
Any attempt to reverse the process results in the aforementioned lost thing staying lost for way longer. So, after deconstructing what I did Saturday night (when I lost the wallet) I remembered that in an attempt to relocate three hundred dollars in rolled change (heavy) I considered emptying and using the shoebox. I then changed my mind and used a canvas bag, leaving the opened box in the middle of my floor. Upon returning home from the 'allstar improv supershow' I did what I usually do, which is toss all the pocket-matter I find while disrobing, onto my floor. The wallet must have landed in the box, which in an unprecedented fit of cleanliness the next morning, returned to its rightful place under some Joyce Carol Oats books, and Alex Garland's The Tesseract. And now, here I am reunited with my wallet, wondering what it must have thought during it's past few days in darkness.

If all those other aspects of my past could talk, they'd all reflect very different kinds of Desiree. My wallet would probably be shocked.
The recorder would wonder if I attained musical greatness (nope)
The note would be curious if James and I got together (also nope)
And the merit certificate would be fairly confident in the fact that I continued on with my winning archery skills (a resounding nope)
Man, the Desiree in the shoebox is way cooler than the Desiree with the wallet.

But the latter is two falafels away from a free donair.

Oh, and how could I ever forget...
In an open scene, a team was playing a game in the style of a comic book, and the object they got to use to base the main character around was a turkey baster....
The superhero's name? Masterbaster.
Gold.

".......And then the clouds parted, and God appeared, and looked down at Nick and said... 'Conform'"
-An improvisor telling a fairy tale to a bunch of kids
"You see this? This is where women come to deal with their insecurities."
-Matt Godsoe of CWImprov explaining a tanning bed
"Well, it's a speedo, but it's still cheese."
-a rookie improvisers first big laugh

" How do you make a good dog a bad dog? You cut off its leg."
-Prof. MacIsaac, explaining virtue
I love my professors.

You know what I hate about the winter?
Everything.
I hate winter. Hate in the 'hate is a strong word' sense. Loathe. I really, in all honesty, can't see what would be so bad in a world without winter. I'll acknowledge that winter can be attractive. Everything looks pristine and clean and pure, for about 4 days, and then it starts melting and the world turns a dingey brownish beige, decidedly unattractive.
Today is one of those days that reminds me that I hate winter. You see, I live in Ottawa, located in Ontario, Canada. We get 6-8 straight months of this nonsense...and this year, it started EARLY. Thank you very much.
So today all I wanted to do was go for a walk. I'm studying for a very intense exam, and needed to clear my head. So wanderingoutside sounded about right. So I bundle up like the good little girl that I am, and head out into the cold. Keep in mind, it's not even really cold yet, it's just getting started. But today's cold was a genre of cold that is the harshest. The dry cold.
To those of you unfamiliar, it's the kind of cold that sneaks up on you, rises out of the ground, up, under you protective layers of clothing, and wraps its arms around you saturating you down to the very fibre of your being, squeezing every last molecule of warmth out of your body. No part is left unaffected. Sufficed to say, the walk was shortlived, and now I'm home injesting tea, sneaking up on people to warm my nose in the crook of their necks.
That's the best way to do it.

I work with the Canadian Improv Games. It's quite possibly the awesomest organization around.
The idea of the improv games is getting one improv team into every single Canadian highschool, and getting them to compete in the spirit of loving competition in a series of different tournaments (league play, then regional tournaments, then the big national tournament here in Ottawa) and there is also a wicked summer camp for kids and graduated improvisers to get together and jam and go crazy. Its so much fun. Just, insanely good for everyone involved.

Where I fit in is that my brother played for four years, and then we overlapped for one, and I went on and played for another three years, and now I'm in year two of volunteering. To brag for ten whole seconds, the team we played with is the only team in improv history to make it to the National level of competition 8 years in a row. We rocked.

Now, obviously working behind the scenes isn't going to be as fun as being on stage, but I still get to do some incredible stuff, namely make up suggestions, train the kids, adjudicate performances and watch loads of wonderful/horrible improv. My 'real' job is media relations, but that's not fun to talk about.
Last night was the first night of the first round of exhibition play, and it was pretty wicked, for beginner improv. Some of my favorite lines of the night include:

"Well, get cracking, these worms aren't going to eat themselves....or maybe they will."
"Hey, we're not turtles!!" (some guy doing the character of obvious)
"My gangrene is WAY better than your gangrene"
and my personal favorite, a vignette by a team exploring the theme of Justice (working it as poetic justice)
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I've gathered you here on this memorable day in 1902, to launch my new, state of the art luxury liner. This magnificent beast is the largest ever made, and will sail 2000 passengers from port to port in the upmost style and comfort. It is indestructible. That's right. INDESTRUCTIBLE. And in a feat of incredible hubris, based on our amazing arrogance, we've even given her a name that reeks of it's magnitude and wonder. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you....Unsinkaboat!"

I can't wait to get back on stage.

Weeeeee! Having a blog is fun! It's the quintessential new toy. I'll have to remember to get something for Ned to even the field...something lacey. I intend on treating this the same way I'd treat any other new gadget. Play with it continuously until it is broken, misplaced or replaced...and since Christmas is quickly approaching with the promise of even more new toys, this gives us 18 days to indulge...so lets!

I blame my parents.
Yesternight, on my way home from 'studying' at Sandra's house, something incredible happened.
I love declarative sentences.
I was on the bus, as I am an average of 2 hours a day, thanks to the convenient placement of Carleton, and I was listening to none other than Kenny Loggins. Something about Footloose just speaks to me...'yes, I DO want to kick off my sunday shoes!'
I was just minding my own busridding business, looking around, bouncing my knees and being me, when the bus lurched to a stop at the hurdman station. A few people trickle in, not much as it was almost 2 in the morning...when all of a sudden, Evil stepped up to the change-collector thing.
Now, I know evil sounds like quite the adjective, but this guy was FRIGHTENING. He was weaving and bobbing, obviously rather intoxicated (on what I'm assuming was HUMAN BLOOD), loud, boorish, mean and scary. He looked like every most wanted poster I've ever seen (the real ones, not the novelty fair ones) After being obnoxious and rude to the bus driver, he swings his evil head to the left, scanning the bus for potential kills (again, I assume) when his steely lecherous gaze rests on mine. No doubt the whole bus was looking at him, but he chose to focus on me. And what do I do when confronted with a monster looking into my soul? I smile at him.

I didn't mean to. I didn't WANT to, any normal person in my position would have looked away, out the window, at my shoes, but not me! I'm the result of 20 years of 'niceness' training from my freaking mom. Now it's ingrained in my soul, that when someone makes eye contact, you smile. This little tidbit was coupled with the 'walk with your head up, looking the world in the face' idea, which results in me falling down alot, after tripping over small, ground-dwelling objects.
Anyway, so now, Evil is looking at me, smiling back.
So he begins his entry into the bus. I finally peel my eyes off the cretin, and look out the window, cursing myself in my head. He walks through the bus, painfully slowly, passing the veritable ass-load of empty seats, and the space between us was closing...I can feel his eyes scan the bus, but ultimately coming to a halt at me....

[12/7/2002 10:47:40 PM | Desiree Connors]
...So, filled with the knowledge that Evil is going to sit beside me, and odds are, want to converse about evil things, I heave a sigh and shift as far to the wall of the bus as I possibly can. As I feel the seat beside me filling with person, I turn to look at my new found bus-buddy. I see blond hair. Evil's not blond...some chick sat beside me. And I've never seen her before.

The look on my face must have been telling, as the girl smiles and says "I figured if he wasn't going to sit with you, he'd sit with me.'
I've never wanted to kiss another woman more in my life. This girl was a genius. Evil, who had stopped right in front of us, grumbled something incoherent, and moved on to sit at the back of the bus, and swore at some teenaged boys for the rest of the ride. My savior's name is Tracy. She was on her way home from her boyfriend's house, and like me, strange men on the bus like to sit next to her, and talk to her.
Sometimes, I love strangers so much I wish I could live my life never getting close to people. I'd always be surprised, and I'd rarely get hurt.

You know the good thing about that nagging little voice telling you you should be studying? If you listen to Diana Krall loud enough, it can be drowned out.

This past summer I spent 6 weeks in Mexico. Why? Because I could. Doing what? Doing whatever...nothing mostly (except consuming lots of ice cream) but nothing in another country. Surrounded with a different language, different foods, different everthing. Lots of Shakira.
But I digress
While I was in Mexico, I kept a journal. Usually I don't, but then, I did. A few friends suggested I post said journal on the internet. But then I didn't know how. Enter Ned. My glorious, fairy-godmother like stranger/friend who's generously given me the means. So when the creative wells run dry, I guess I'll toss up the occaisional Mexico journal entry. At random.

July 20th, 2002, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
Today is my father's birthday, and I forgot to call. I'm an awful daughter. Horrible. I should be strapped. Well, not really. I just hope this doesn't foreshadow how my away from home life is going to be...Oh well, Onwards and Upwards.
Yesterday, José, one of Maria's (many) gentlemen callers stopped by to say hello and to drop off Pastry. Pastry! That's adorable!
Regardless, She was not home, so Sandra and I ran defense, 'talking' to him through a series of facial expressions, mime and present tense broken spanish.
We conversed about hair, Canada and education until all of us were physically exhausted by the frantic conversation.
After minute 3 of awkward silence, Sandra, in what can only be described as a stroke of interlingual genius, suggest monkeys.
Ladies and gentlemen (or more realistically, Ned), the inventor of a Barrel of Monkeys should be awarded the Noble Peace Prize.
45 minutes of unadulterated monkey based fun, unfettered by the shackles of language. It was beautiful, really. A wonder to behold.
The only word spoken the whole time was 'monkeys'. 'Monkeys?' 'Monkeys.' ' MONKEEEEEEYS!!!'
Then Maria arrived, and José left to fawn over her.

Oh well, we'll always have monkeys.

.....Hello? Is this thing on? Odds are I'm doing this wrong, but in all honesty, myself and Ned will probably be the only people to ever view this, so I guess it's all good. I wish I had something more inspirational to say in my first post, but I'm studying for my religion exam and most of my creative ideas have been replaced with useless religiony type things...like Jesus.
At the risk of someone who isn't Ned stumbling across this site, I feel I should roughly introduce myself and what I'm doing here. I'm Desiree, of the aforementioned hooker name, and I'm a Canadian university student. Ned has everso kindly set me up with my own little hiding place where I can display thoughts and stories and ramblings. Some will be fictional, others not. Some will be entertaining and good, others....not. But with the frequency that I find myself on line, I'm betting they will occur fairly regularily. So if nothing else, praise me for that...That can be my epitaph. 'She was a strange girl, but she was regular'. Maybe not.