Contest? Contest. Contest!

So, I've decided to erect (that one goes out to the people finding my page searching for porn) a whole new site while I'm in Belgium to reflect the change of location. It will be green. I will use it to detail my comings and goings and trials and tribulations and I will try not to censor myself although my parents will be reading it. We'll see how this goes.

Right, so how does this effect me you ask? Well, cherished reader, now that my numbers are back up to about 20 hits a day, I figure there's enough traffic to put to y'all to work. I need to name this new site. I didn't name unsustained focus, and had I tried it would have been nowhere near as appropriate and perfect. It would have turned in to DaisyKittenFiasco or something random and undefined.

Don't let me turn the adventures of Desiree in Belgium into DaisyKittenFiasco.
Name the site.
Winner gets muffins.

So last night some 30 of my co-workers threw me a surprise going-away party at my favorite pub. I think my favorite part of the whole procedure was when the element of 'surprise' was lost completely earlier on in the day when I announced i couldn't go out because I'd been partying too hard the past few days and was just going to stay in with some close friends before they left for Montreal.

"No." Said Jen, looking more angry than anything else.
Natalie started laughing nervously, her eyes darting from angry Jen to Shannon, who suddenly became very interested in her salad.
"Seriously guys, I'm just going to hang out with Stacey and Joanna and say goodbye, but we'll go out next weekend okay?"
At this Jen became a kind of bitter I thought only mothers and ex-boyfriends had access too.
"Hey Anne! Come here. Desiree can't come out tonight. Yeah, she has other plans."
Anne shows up, hands on hips, confrontational but smiling.
"Well Des, we're throwing you a surprise party and people are coming in from Toronto for it so you can choose to be there or not. But drinks are going to be bought for you, so you may as well be there."

It was a wonderful night. So much love, and only one breakdown. There is no other feeling than having people fight to comfort you while you're crying about how much you're going to miss everyone. They made speeches. I made a speech. I believe it hinged on 'and if you don't stop buying me drinks you'll all forget why you seem to like me so much when I barf all over your stuff.'

Between that and deciding to drive to Montreal tomorrow to delay saying goodbye to some girls, yesterday wasn't half bad.

the last thing I remember drinking was blue and had a name that started with 'pan-galactic' and ended with the word 'blaster'.

This isn't going to feel good tomorrow, but the heart to heart I had with Mike in front of the parliament buildings about leaving was far worth the inevitable pain,

Pan galactic garbleblaster? Maybe. There was Jack in it. It was blue. It's like I don't even like my own body.

goodnight

And I was having such a good day too.

When you called me over I felt ashamed, mainly because I never once returned your phonecalls, even when you called every single day for a month.

But I need you to understand that it wasn't one sweeping decision, so much as every single day, when I got your messages dripping with insinuation, I decided not to call you. For that day. Then the next day, when the same choice presented itself, I'd consider and then choose. Every single day I chose not to call you. I don't know if that's better or worse but it's honest.

I hope that clears things up.

You told me you hated vegans with no reason as to why.
If you were to ask me why I chose not to call you, I'd have to say that was a scale-tipping factor.

Last night at Minglewoods in the middle of getting really, fantastically drunk, I ran in to an old highschool friend who is currently training for the WWE. He's huge and we talked about Calgary for a good little while until he casually mentioned his wrestly-name is Adam Lust.

Don't laugh at a wrestler. Or tease him because of his pony tail.
Thank god I have breasts.

So, when I left for Regina I told everyone to make sure nothing earth-shattering happens so I don't miss it.



Yeah...I was the pinpoint of light two inches to the right of all the excitement.
Sons of Bitches. Biggest power outage in history and I'm in a field in Saskatchewan. What's worse is my friends played hide and go seek in a cornfield during the blackout. Imagine how much fun that would be, cause that's all I can do, is imagine.

So when I go to Belgium and I say 'make sure nothing earth shattering happens while I'm gone', I MEAN it.

It was pretty stupid of me to allow sunrises to be what reminds me of you.
Every single day, when the world becomes that warming down shade of purple, you creep up on me and touch the back of my neck.

It's my own fault though, can't really blame you.
But I always did so I will anyway.

This is my goodnight face

I paid money to go see Freddy vs Jason today. It wasn't a good movie, but it was a movie about to indestructable bad guys duking it out. Duking. Put up your dukes? Someone correct me because that's GOT to be misspelled.

Anyhow, Best line in the whole movie goes to the stoner stereotype: "Man, that goalie was pissed off about something."

Grrrrrrrrrrrowllllllllllllerrrrrrrrrrrrokay fine.

Emotional rollercoaster? Emotional Pogo-Ball? Emotional Trapeze-Artist? It would appear I'm losing grip with a whole lot of stuff right now. Fear is the predominant emotion. I'm going to laugh at all of this in a month or so they say. I'm going to laugh.

I still do laugh though. All the time. At random things. At things I say in my head. At fictitious conversations. At a character I invented based on that awkward kid you knew in highschool. The one who was always in the principals office, though he never was a troublemaker. More like a pain in the ass.

This kid is in grade ten. He has reddish hair and is physically and mentally gawky. His shtick is saying everything in the third person, set to music. "Pete has steel-toed boots" "Pete's got staples in his head". He is resiliant. He is hyper.
This has kept me amused all day at work. This kid will be in a sketch I will write shortly. It will probably be performed by two men who will begin touring Canada and the US together in a few months. You should all alter your lives and lifestyles so as to see these two men do improv.

What do you want from me?

Why have you made it your job to leave me so unsatisfied? I spend all my time waiting for you to stop dancing long enough for me to see what you really stand for, and then you run. All I want is to know what you're thinking, wholly, unadulterated and unrestrained and yet you throw these empty words at me and laugh at my emotional response.

Forgive me for feeling but I thought we understood each other here. We both got to the same place at the same time, yet you're never home and I'm always waiting. I've never felt so insecure in my emotions before. What the hell am I doing all of this for if you can't even hold my gaze?

I try to confess these things to you and you laugh. You're fickle and guarded and I can't just sit here like the scorpio that I am and fester with jealousy and curiosity for much longer. What's the prognosis? How much more do I have to take before you let me see what's behind those eyes?

This is not about any of you.
This is entirely new problem.

I just said the first serious goodbye, although I'm going to see both of the girls who I'd goodbyed again.
The deal is, we're a trio. So I said goodbye to the three of us together. We group hugged because we're lame girls who went to see Now and Then together and also rented the Babysitters Club movie once.

Now Jen's off to Wawa for a week and Stacey leaves on Saturday then Jen gets back and leaves on the 2nd.
And I haven't cried yet.

Yet.
I need a hug though.

Despite all of the unpleasantness of actually being at the doctor's office, I really enjoy being at the doctor's office.

Here's why:

1- It allows me to catch up on all the issues of National Geographic I have missed. Today, for example, I got to read about Canada's first centennial and the excitement surround Montreal's expo 67. Plus all the americanization of Micronesia. Yes I did say Canada's FIRST centennial and Expo 67. It was the September 1967 issue.

2- I'm at least three decades younger than every other patient there. Yousee, my doctor is awesome. She's really youthful and fun and travels and has a great sense of humour, so when she left the family practice where my whole family went to start a fledgling practice on her own, I followed, leaving the rest of my family to their own doctors. What I was never informed was that her new practice was nestled in the burrows of Beacon Hill, where the average person is a hexagenarian with osteoporosis and bad circulation. Whenever I'm at the office I get more attention than at any bar I've ever been in AND I leave feeling more youthful and healthy than ever before.

The gentleman waiting beside me told me all about Expo 67, as he was there when he was around my age. The food was alright, but the women were all beautiful and french, so he had no complaints.

Falling asleep beside someone and waking up alone is something that automatically makes you feel like a horrible person.

This is not as scandalous as it sounds.

After I got home from the bar last night, forced myself to drink four glasses of water and ate some bread, I stumbled upstairs into my room to see the shadowy silhouette of my best friend sleeping in my bed. I'd figured this might happen earlier on in the night, so the shock was minimal but the curveball it threw at my 'drunk and getting ready for bed' routine was fairly powerful.

Firstly, I always assume I'm making way to much noise, especially if I've been drinking, so I automatically cut the speed by which I do things in half, because everyone knows that slow equals quiet. I also had the decency to not turn on any lights, as it was 2:30 and she did have to get up at 7 in the morning, so what followed was a 20 minute slow-motion dance which came to its rousing climax as I stumbled into my lamp while trying to get in to what I assumed was boxer shorts.

She woke up. Turned on the lights so I could get dressed like a normal person and we lay there recapping our individual strange/awesome nights. I fell asleep holding her hand half as a gesture of cuddliness and half because sometimes you forget that it's the job of your friends to love you unconditionally. When I woke up this morning and found her side empty I felt horrible. I hadn't said goodbye, I hadn't even noticed her leave. I'm the worst boyfriend ever.

Right before I fell asleep Kathy was trying to justify my own actions to me. We established that this summer for me has been the most and least romantic summer of my entire life. The best and worst things have happened to me, usually simultaneously. However, since I'm an apparent eternal optimist, I'm just going to keep pilling everything under the 'pro' column until I no longer have any room. Then I'll re-assess.

Moral of the story? Chicks before Dicks.

Remember Bryan Adams?

Yeah, me neither.

My camp nickname was Princess. It was chosen because it was the one thing they could call me which made me physically react to it by flinching. I am not a Princess.

It all started out in the truck, as I had begun being transformed by the sheer phallyc power that is a half-ton four door Silverado. My truck is bigger than yours. You call THAT a truck? THIS is a motherfucking TRUCK. I was driving a shift through Manitoba, with a mesh hat and my aviators on. We'd stopped in Indian Head and I got a piece of wheat to suck on, and as I drove I was slowly transforming into a trucker named Dodge. Dodge doesn't speak much, and sure as hell doesn't take orders from no one (he also has bad grammar) so when my brother asked politely from the bedroom (the truck was divided into rooms) for me to turn a song up, I curtly replied 'turn your own fucking song up' in my Dodge voice. From then on, the boys called me Princess in an obvious identification of Dodge's latent homosexuality.

At another junction in the trip, Scott asked my brother to help him move something by referring to him as 'Connors'. The funny thing is, as he is my brother, we share a last name, so both of us rushed to help which caused some mild confusion. Scott's solution? Refer to us by using our middle names, because obviously our first names were of no use to him.

My middle name is Dawn. Enter Princess Dawn, the most nauseatingly feminine name known to man. "Princess Dawn, can you help me unload this scaffolding? Princess Dawn, can you readjust the L bracket on those flats?"

Eventually, for the sake of convenience, it was re-abreviated to Princess.

The other girls? They had nicknames like Doom, Crocus, Star and Ky. Boys had names like Juice, Molasses, Sweet Sweet, Two Bit and Catch.

Once I'd convinced several of the younger campers I was the heiress to an eastern european throne though, I grew into it.

I've spent all of today walking into or avoiding walking into things. It's like I lost all idea of the length of my limbs and width of my body while I was gone. I have to relearn corners and the locations of shin-height objects by braille apparently. Stupid me.

Yesterday was the first day I was clean, fed, rested and in fresh clothes all at the same time in 2 weeks. Watching that line of dirt that washed off of me go down the drain was almost sad. I love being filthy dirty. We made a mud pit and did a movement workshop in it just so we could come to lunch caked with awful. Everyone looked at us with a kind of envy that I'll always remember.

At one point I was in a scene with a representative from Spokane, Winnepeg, Vancouver, Regina and Toronto. It was an awesome scene. We were doing IFC on the top of a moonlit hill. Crazy amazing. The life I've led so far makes me jealous of my past.

So I think I'm going to try and post once a day until I leave. Afterwhich this page may go underground for a while. You see, I'm gonna use it as an online travelly journal type thing so my folks and other relatives and friends can keep tabs on me and my whereabouts. However, the last 6 months won't be made available to them, so I think I'm going to hide them somewhere...maybe not even on my own page. Just so those of you who care can go back, but those who don't need to know can continue to live in blissful ignorance of all this nonsense. Maybe I'll start up an entirely new page and run them both...who knows?

I'm back from improv camp.
I fell in love with roughly 21 out of the 22 staff members I worked with. The rogue one being my brother. I also re-fell in love with my best friend and others whom I'd already met before. So much love.

2 weeks away from home, 5 days on the road. 2 massive parties. There's so much to say. I've never done the camp thing, and figured it wouldn't be so...I cried a lot.

My body is wracked, my brain is empty. My improv muscle is torn. This place is my happiest place on earth. A beautiful scenic local where the moon was full and you could see shooting stars, the northern lights and mars all in the same sitting. A place where a nation's worth of young improvisors got together and jammed late into the night, and spread their wealths of knowledge to the thirsty youth during the day. I went on many walks.


This is such a boring post.

I leave in 23 days.

After the ritual was done, and we all sat around sweaty, painted and exhausted, we got up and spent the next two hours hugging each other in silence. Laughing and weeping, touching each other's faces and knowing that that was the most powerful connection such a large group could share. I felt cleansed and raped of all emotion. I felt born.

Things that I am glad I am not:

-a fruitfly
-one our back of the house guys (it gets so HOT back there)
-hyper-religious and closeminded
-under nourished
-hurting
-allergic to stuff, other than cats
-afraid of flying
-a criminal (couldn't get out of the country)
-5'9
-someone void of humour or patience
-Mr Weatherbee from the Archies. Those kids gave him such a hard time.

"G-7! Sink THIS you son of a bitch!"

Although I maintain that this is one of my best summers ever, lately it would seem that I do nothing other than work and sleep.

I passed my G test the other day, which now means I can drive unsupervised on class 400 highways (which I did already) and can drive with up to .08 (or so I believe) percent of alcohol in my blood. Triumph! I also dropped 1254 of our Canadian dollars on a ticket to Paris. One thousand two hundred and fifty four dollars. That the longest phrase of money I've ever spent on ANYTHING. By far. To celebrate I bought an over priced coffee drink and nanaimo bar from the local coffee dispensing mega-corporation. I then placed it on my roof and drove for two blocks before remembering my clichéd mistake. I quickly pulled over to check if it was still there. No luck. If yours was the car I coated with iced chai on Bank street between First and Second, I'm dearly sorry. If it makes you feel any better I spent almost 5 dollars on it and had about 3 sips.

So the day after the day after tomorrow. (Tuesday for those doing the math), I'm getting in a big-ass truck with two guys and driving the three days to Regina, where god-willing we will arrive in time for a party. Three straight days of driving. No stops for anything other than gas, food and nature calls. I'm assuming this will be akin to when you got that concussion in grade six from slipping on a patch of ice while playing british bulldog, and they took you to the emergency room because you kept throwing up, and made you wait in the second waiting room. The smaller one. Except our waiting room will be WAY smaller. And stuffier. And moving. With power windows. With my brother and Scott in it, probably arguing. Over music or astronauts or something. And I'll be in the back, playing travel battleship by myself. And the music should be better.

Did I mention we rented a four door TRUCK? I don't think you could get more kickass unless we were driving a tank. The gas consumption is probably about equal. I love trucks. They're so cool. It's like being up on a horse, you have to CLIMB into them. Man. Stoked. Stoked like whoa. If they don't let me drive I will kill them. Simple as that. Something involving the little mini boats and pegs.

Since I'll be working like a fiend until then, this may very well be my last communication until August 21st. Promise me you'll live extra-hard for me, cause I know I will.

PS: If there's anyone out there that can get me a student Visa for Belgium without all this hassle, I'd greatly appreciate it.
PPS: I got my package from Leuven the other day, so I'm super-ultra going for sure. Stamped it. No erasies. Panic commences now.