What I Am is What I Was

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” -Albert Einstein“In youth we learn; in age we understand.” -Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach◊ Ok, here's the thing about me and blog tags: I usually ignore them. On the rare occasion that another blogger writes a post about something and then "tags" me to tackle the same topic, my normal response is to read it, possibly comment on it and then go about with my daily scowling and mocking. However, I have been known to play along when the topic is interesting enough, if I think that I might be able to have fun with it, the planets are in the proper alignment. It also helps if I'm kind of drunk. So it was that my friend Stephanie, on her blog, called me out when she wrote a rather cool post in the form of 3 letters - to her past, present, and future selves. So I said, "giddy...
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Annoying Americans, Volume 4 – Expat Bloggers

Annoying Americans, Volume 4 – Expat Bloggers

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

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

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...
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Coffee Cups & Campgrounds: The Road Back to France

Coffee Cups & Campgrounds: The Road Back to France

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...
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Bavaria: Fairy Tales Set to the Sounds of Sausage

Bavaria: Fairy Tales Set to the Sounds of Sausage

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...
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Miles of Berlin Before We Sleep

Miles of Berlin Before We Sleep

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
"Gotta go over the Berlin Wall I don't understand it.... I gotta go over the wall I don't understand this bit at all...." -Sex Pistols, Holiday in the Sun * * * The world is full of great cities, each of them considered "great" for reasons all their own. I haven't seen them all and there's a good chance that I never will, but I've seen a few. I've been rained on in London. I've stepped in Parisian doggie doo on my way to the Eiffel Tower. I've drunk sweet, sweet Guinness in Dublin. I've done a shitty Sean Connery imitation in Edinburgh. I have yet to argue with a NYC cab driver, but it's on my list of clichés to act out. Then there's Berlin. Sure, I consumed sausages, beer and sauerkraut in Berlin, so there's one more big city cliché checked off on the list, but there's so much more to it. I went crazy in Berlin. I walked around slack-jawed, laughed, learned, cried and shook my fist at Berlin while...
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