Funny Shit

The Cure for Arachnophobia

March 9, 2015November 30, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

I sat with my friend Ed at the tiny kitchen table in my shitty apartment sipping coffee, watching the spider dangling above us. The table used to sit in a Village Inn, before it became the place where I ate ramen and drank coffee with my downstairs neighbor."Dude. Squish that thing.""Aw, we don't have to do that," he said, stepping up on a Village Inn chair. "You got a jar or glass or something?"I handed him a jar. He trapped the spider in it and offered to take it outside, but I stopped him, reaching for the jar. A weird curiosity suddenly laid eggs in my brain. I poked some holes in the lid."I've got to get rid of the arachnophobia somehow," I said.I named the fuzzy brown wolf spider Cowboy Otis. For a few months, I took him everywhere. To work. To the bar. To lunch at Souper Salad and to my weekly therapy sessions. He sat on the...

I Got Nerdy & Ended Up With a Ridiculous Comic

November 20, 2013November 30, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

I like to get my nerd on. One of the really cool things about the internet - aside from funny animal .gifs on Buzzfeed - is the bottomless pit of nerdery. This year, I've spent countless hours getting lost on various subjects in iTunes U, Open Culture and Coursera.This summer, I enrolled in a writing class on Coursera. It wasn't on craft, but the basic mechanics of grammar, along with paragraph and sentence structure. It was a nice review on the basics, but also a nice intro to a MOOC (massive open online course), which I'd been curious about.I got into it. I enrolled in a few more courses. One of which was Comic Books and Graphic Novels, from the University of Colorado in Boulder.I fucking loved this class. Come on... a class where I get to watch PowerPoint lectures about Batman and study Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman? For free? HELL. YES.In all seriousness, though, this was an interesting...

House Hunting, Humidity & Humiliation

February 23, 2011November 30, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

"Never make a decision when you need to pee." -Leonard Cohen * The GPS on the dashboard said we were still 20 minutes away from Épernon. This Saturday morning was the fourth Saturday morning in a row in which Olivier and I had woken at 6am to make the hour-long drive to Épernon or Rambouillet. Maybe it was the fifth Saturday. I've lost track. Four or five Saturdays in a row. Rising early. Spending the day in our car, or in the car of another real estate agent. We've met five of those, now. Or maybe six. I don't remember. Don't ask me how many houses we've wandered in and out of in an effort to find one that we can fall in love with. I'd say about twenty. Twenty houses. Maybe thirty. I can't recall. Anyway... where was I? Oh, right. The dashboard. The GPS. 20 minutes. I looked over at Olivier. "Um... I have to pee," I said. "Didn't you just go before we left the house?" "Yeah. But that...

Funky Fresh Fate

September 1, 2008November 30, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

I walked out of the pooping closet and informed my husband, "From now on, you will address me as Super Ferret Funky Fresh."Olivier pulled the toothbrush from his mouth. "Why?" He asked, slightly muffled by foam."It's my hip-hop name. I decided that I needed one just now when I was pooping," I said.He shrugged and turned to spit into the sink. "Okay. Super Ferret Funky Fresh. Got it."The next morning, I was informed that I would now be referring to Olivier as Hyper Furry From the Galaxy. There was really only one thing left for us to do: sing a theme tune.Which we did. It was only a matter of time before we had a hyper-funky mix safely stored away in iTunes.Several months later, we were walking through the mall in Créteil after another annoying visa-related visit. We passed a myriad of the typical stores that one would expect to find in a mall.We eventually came upon one particularly in-your-face...

The IKEA Nesting Instinct

November 23, 2007November 30, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

"And I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue." ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 5"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you." ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 5~I feel as though I've committed some sort of blasphemy. I had done so well, selling, giving, and throwing away most of my material possessions - all the while, reminding myself that, "the things you own end up owning you."It was...

Everyone Has a Superpower

October 10, 2007November 30, 2020 by Rasmenia Comment Closed

Every time my husband hits "pause" on the TV, it never fails to freeze the image of the person on the screen in an absolutely hilarious moment.The actor's face is frozen in the most unflattering expression, their body contorted leaving them looking hilariously fucked-up.That's his superpower.I have a superpower, too. Besides having the ability to make even very shitty dollar bills work in just about any vending machine, I also have animal-like claws. Yep, it's true. They grow at an unusually fast rate. I have to cut them every couple of weeks with a pair of those big-ass toenail clippers, but only after I've just gotten out of a very long and hot shower to get them into a semi-soft state. They are so hard that they almost never break. When they do break, it generally requires some quick, violent action and it's like snapping a piece of plastic; a loss of flesh and a great deal of blood is...