Rasmenia, Author at Rasmenian Detritus – Page 22 of 42

Annoying Americans, Volume 4 – Expat Bloggers

October 30, 2009November 23, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

American expat bloggers... well, yeah - it's true that with my little blue passport, Wordpress account & carte de séjour, I meet all of the criteria. But, just wait... hold back your fist-pumping, cries of "hypocrite!" for just a moment. I might get around to making a point... eventually. Before I moved to France, I spent a great deal of time scouring the internet for information on the place that was to be my new home. It was a big move, going from Loveland, Colorado to Paris, France. I was planning to get married to a French man soon after my arrival - I was nervous, excited, stressed-out & elated. I was doing this alone, with only my faithful feline sidekick.Even though I had already been to France a couple of times already, I wanted to find as much information as I could, so that I could get a clearer picture of what in the hell I was getting myself into. Some...

When Editors Attack or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love My Writing

October 4, 2009November 23, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." -Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction"As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward." -Augusten Burroughs. Everything that I'm about to tell you is completely true, except for the parts that aren't, but there aren't any of those, so let's just get to it. Many writers, as you may or may not know, tend to suffer from a puzzling paradox of a fragile ego combined with a righteous arrogance. We constantly battle fear & self doubt, yet we still manage to believe in ourselves & our words to the very end. Day to day, depending on the weather, intensity of hangover, or how we feel about other people that day, we may feel rather insecure...

Coffee Cups & Campgrounds: The Road Back to France

September 30, 2009December 21, 2018 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

"'Mid pleasures and palaces through we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like Home." -J. Howard Payne"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." -George Moore "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." -T.S. Eliot* * * I stared out the window, watching Germany roll by as we made our way to Freiburg. "You know," I said to Olivier. "I can't recall the last time that I had a decent cup of coffee." He pulled on his beard as he steered our little Renault up the highway, recalling all of the cups of coffee we'd drunk over the past days.Then he said, "We haven't had a decent cup of coffee since we left France." It was true. I had some drip coffee from a bakery with my kanelgiffel in Copenhagen. We made some nasty instant sludge while camping in Sweden and had some watered-down American style joe with our Frühstück in...

Bavaria: Fairy Tales Set to the Sounds of Sausage

September 24, 2009December 2, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

After we had left ever-changing Berlin behind us and the gray nightmares of the concentration camp, Olivier and I headed south, where everything had slowly changed from gray to green and the sharp, hard edges of barracks and cities had smoothed, turning into the rolling hills of Bavaria and the Black Forest of Germany. Since we had entered a new region, I began fidgeting around with the buttons on the radio, to see what it sounded like here. Immediately, I was reminded of this: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAUP1wsmqUU Indeed, that's what Bavaria sounds like. What Bavaria looks like is probably just as one might imagine. As cliché as it sounds, the scenery and architecture of the homes did remind me very much of those Grimm's Fairy Tales that I read when I was just a wee little Razzy. "People here don't greet one another with 'Guten Tag'," Olivier told me. "People in this region greet one another with 'Grüß Gott'." "Uh-huh", I said. "So, what does that mean? What's the difference?" "Grüß...

Pain Don’t Hurt

September 15, 2009October 30, 2009 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

"One thing I'm not gonna do is chase staying alive." -Patrick Swayze "I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, not lived in the shadow of cancer, but in the light." -Patrick Swayze "What winning is to me is not giving up, is no matter what's thrown at me, I can take it, & I can keep going." -Patrick SwayzePatrick Swayze August 18, 1952 – September 14, 2009.[tags]Patrick Swayze, fuck cancer[/tags]....

He Falls Down Laughing

September 15, 2009October 30, 2009 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

"Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us." — Jim Carroll"I'll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine." — Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems"I just wanna be pure, I just wanna be pure." -Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries "They were all my friends, and they died." -The Jim Carroll Band Jim Carroll August 1, 1950 – September 11, 2009.[tags]Jim Carroll, poet[/tags]...