Cosima Underwater

I bought a new CD last week, and I am slightly in love with it. My whole family hums Cole Porter songs, because I have played this CD over and over, since I bought it. The one below is so far my favorite. I have heard quite a few interpretations of Love for Sale, but no one sings it as lazily sexy as Hildegard Knef. Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition I love as well (how can you not?).

Ella Fitzgerald once said that Hildegard Knef is the best singer without a voice. It was meant as a compliment (lol), because Knef’s strength undoubtedly is her accentuation.

And if you wonder, who the heck is Hildegard Knef go here and here.

I have tried to post comments on several blogs today, but couldn’t. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that I have switched to blogger beta, while the blogs I have tried to comment on have not. Haloscan commenting btw works fine for me. Sigh… I just hope they are working on this fast.

I have learnt my lesson. When the next upgrade comes along, I will be the last to convert.

When in Berlin, I often ride my bicycle to get around. It’s a pleasant work-out and convenient mode of transport. It’s reasonably safe too, because the city has a large network of bicycle paths. At intersections, bicyclists have the right of way before turning cars, which makes riding a bike a lot less stressful, however it’s always better to double-check with a quick glance to the left if cars are really waiting.

Recently, I also bought a helmet, which is mandatory for children but not for adults. In a collision with a truck, it will probably not help me much, but I hope it will make the landing in many other scenarios much softer.

These are pictures from a bike ride I did earlier in the summer. Please excuse the quality of some, most were taken while I was in the saddle.

Last checks

The Autobahn ;)

At many intersections, bicyclists even have their own traffic light, which turns green earlier than the one for cars.

The terrace restaurant on top of this department store is an excellent place for a break. The strawberry cake was divine :).

Fellow bikers, fast and furious.

On this occasion, I went to an outdoor exhibition in the center of Berlin, called Topography of Terror. The exhibition is located in and around the excavated cellars of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, and other Nazi managerial buildings. Most of the buildings were destroyed during aerial bombardments, what remained was demolished in the 1950s. It was also the site of the Gestapo house prison, where political enemies and resistance fighters were held for interrogation, which very often included torture.

This is a picture of the exhibition and on the right (above the small wooden roof) is one of only a few remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall. Two historic ruins side by side that exemplify human suffering.

tags: hnt

Last weekend, I discovered that I have worn the wrong bra size, probably for years. You can tell, that its going to be a girly post, but then most of my posts are :).

I went into a big department store to buy a new bra, nothing fancy, for wearing under t-shirts. I gathered a dozen bras in the size I have worn since I am a teenager 36B. It was Saturday, lots of women were doing the same, and I had to wait in front of the changing rooms. As I stood and waited in the hot and airless hallway, I got more and more annoyed. The department store has excellent air-conditioning, only were it matters the most there is not a whiff of oxygen.

After a small eternity it was my turn, and I tried the first bra on. It didn’t fit. The band was a little bit too wide, and the cups had wrinkles. The second one didn’t look good either, after the third I was depressed. Your breasts have shrunk, I thought. I have been through all the changes female breasts do during pregnancy, breastfeeding, and afterwards (big, bigger, deflated), so I told myself to just get over it and try an A cup. Then I remembered the queue outside the changing room, no way I was going to stand there again. I discovered a little button with a sticker under it, announcing that you would get assistance if you pressed it. That’s what I did. Then I waited. Then I waited some more, then I pressed the button again, and then I stuck out my head if a sales assistance was nearby. No, not a single one in sight. I gave up, and went out again, gathering all 36As that I could find, and went back to the queue. Well, to cut a long story short, 36A didn’t fit either, the cups were too small. One part of me was relieved (maybe your breasts haven’t shrunk after all?), the other part was in panic (is there an A 1/2 ?).

I remembered a little lingerie shop, to which I had gone with a girl-friend of mine, when we were still teenagers. It is a tiny shop, that caters to women with breast sizes out of the norm, and to women who value personal service. My friend went there for the first reason, she had DD cups, a size for which there is only limited choice in department and chain stores. I am writing about her breast size in the past tense, because she had a breast reduction when she turned eighteen. She is a very attractive, petite person, and her big breasts were causing her back pain. She was also tired of men focusing on her breasts instead of her face.

Anyway, I went to the shop, which hadn’t changed one bit in fifteen years. It still had the old sign over the window Miederwarengeschäft (corset shop), and still had boxes stacked from floor to ceiling along the walls inside. When I entered a soft bell rang, and a matronly lady with reading glasses entered the shop from a back room. I told her my problem, and she took one long look at me from top to bottom. She said that she would like to take my measurements first. We went to the single fitting room, I undressed, and she took my band and my cup measurement. Then she told me that I am a 34C. Wow, from B to A to C in one day. I knew before that cup sizes are not absolute, but depend on the band measurement, but I would have never guessed that I’m a C cup. The lady brought me several t-shirt bras to try, and all of them fit. She also told me, that it is a common problem, most women wear the wrong bra size.

Sensing, that I was in buying mode, she showed me the latest styles from Lejaby, which are just gorgeous. Let’s just say, I bought more then I intended…

So, that’s one little problem in my life that got solved :). And I absolutely recommend going to a lingerie shop with experienced personnel to get your breast measurements taken…if you are female, that is.

I have been thinking about words, and the effect they have on me. I have always loved language. Even as a little girl, I have cherished my children’s books and loved the bedtime stories my mother and father read to me. They set off my imagination in all directions.

Later, as a teenager I was the best client of our neighborhood library. My reading addiction lead to mild conflict with my mother. She doesn’t share the habit, and was worried that I wouldn’t get enough sleep and thought that it is very lonely pastime. In a way that is true, but I still met with friends and had time to do other things, and I never felt lonely when reading. From the outside a reading person must look very alone, but from the inside he or she is at a very intimate place, right in the mind of another person. It cannot get any closer.

I like to watch movies as well, but very often written stories create stronger images in my head than films. I also love the flow and rhythm of language. I am especially in awe of poetry and prose that through words and sentence structure force a certain rhythm or tempo of reading.

When my son learnt to speak, I was reminded of how brusque, and shocking words can be. I still remember, when my son said his first vulgar word. I was shocked, because the little, cute person who said it stood in no relation to what came out of his mouth. I wish, I could say that my son overheard it from older kids, but he probably learnt it from me. From then on, I put much more effort into avoiding slips of tongue. The second mistake I made was to look stunned. He knew then, that whenever he would say the word, he would get an effect. You guess what happened next. He repeated the word in increasing volume, and grinned at me full of pleasure. When he was a little older, we bought a piggy bank. Whenever his parents say a bad word a little fee gets added to the piggy bank, whenever he says one we take threaten to take money out. He plans to buy his first real car with the money.

And then there is the mind game, often set off by words. Reputedly, men get off more by visuals, while women need the right mind game. I don’t know if there really is such a big difference. Often the right visuals set off the mind racing, and the imaginary game is just a series of pictures in one’s head. A flirt in words is one of the greatest mind games there is, to tease and to challenge, innuendos, double meanings…wonderful.

I remember being in bed with the man in my life. He had spoiled me with kisses in all the right places, and was in the midst of …well you know…and then he asked me a naughty question. The question did not require a long answer, but still a sentence with more than three words. At the state I was in, it required enormous concentration, but still I tried. The answer came out rather incoherent, with lots of stops, and I think the end was missing. Still my words had a magic result. Certain words, said in a certain way, can be such a turn-on.

I switched my blog to the new blogger in beta today. So far, I have come across only minor problems. One was that my hit counter code got lost, and needed to be reinstalled. The second, that I haven’t yet figured out how to put a recent comments feature in my sidebar, which I had before.

I am also worried, that those of you who don’t have a google account yet, might not be able to comment anymore. I have disabled the anonymous comment feature, because it had been used for spam before. Please send me an email if you have problems.

tags: blogger, beta

Little Red Riding Hood

A man sat on a bench in a zoo. Behind him, the wolves were eating their meal of raw meat. Before him was the children’s playground. He found the little girl with blond pigtails and pink skirt quite lovely. He wandered to the ice-cream stand and bought a red popsicle. It was not for himself.

Snow White

The girl was thirteen, and had skin as white as snow, and hair as black as ebony. She stood in front of the mirror, applying her mother’s blood-red lipstick. Hidden in a dark corner of the hallway stood her stepfather, watching her. In the kitchen stood her mother, observing him. Wishing her daughter were dead.

Cinderella

The plain girl wished that she would be as beautiful and rich as the prom queen. She lay in her bed, dreaming of a dashing prince on a white horse. The next day, she stole a daring dress from Macy’s. When the high-school quarterback asked her on a date, she didn’t play hard to get.

tags: flash, fiction

Last weekend, three generations of Cosima’s family piled into one car to drive to the countryside. We are city dwellers through and through, but once in a while the street trees don’t suffice anymore and we like to see more green. Around Berlin, there is a whole industry of farmers and orchards catering to Berliners, who would like to show their kids that sheep have four legs and apples grow on trees.

The mainstay of the farm we drove to is white asparagus, for which the area around Berlin is famous for, but they have branched out into strawberries, blueberries, flowers, and pumpkins to make full use of the growing season. They have a restaurant, beer garden, café, and a huge playground for kids. Not to mention, cute bunnies, sheep, goats, a herd of deer, and a few wild boars.

The deer and wild boars are domesticated, and cannot be hunted. However, on the Autobahn on the way, we saw men’s primal hunting instincts on display. The weapons of choice were BMW’s, Mercedes, Audis, and the occasional gutsy Volkswagen, chasing each other on the left lane at speeds around 200 km/h (125 mph). You are tagged if the car behind tailgates you at three meters or closer (for Americans: don’t try this at home, it would land you in jail, why it doesn’t in Germany beats me). Fortunately, the Autobahn we drove on had three lanes, right one for trucks, middle one for cars with sane drivers, and left one for men living out their inferiority complexes.

When we arrived, we discovered that blueberries are in season. Our first stop was the café, where we ate blueberry cake and drank coffee. Then we proceeded to a huge blueberry field surrounded by forest, were other weekend hunters and gatherers were already busy picking these delicious little morsels. A friendly lady gave us baskets and encouraged us to sample as much as we liked. When we had picked enough we would go back to her for weighing and paying.

The strategy of choice was to divide and conquer. The man in my life took two blueberry rows at the beginning of the field, declaring that he would get the biggest and sweetest blueberries, and of course the most. He was only joking, I think, but his words triggered competitive nervousness among the rest of the family tribe members.

I took the row next to my mother and son, who developed an ingenious strategy. My son was the scout “Oma, look here, so many!”, and my mother was the gatherer. I also was surprised to notice, that my son, who normally has to be tricked and coerced into eating anything healthy was busy stuffing blueberries into his mouth. There and then, I declared this outing an overwhelming success.

I did as my son, and proceeded to fill my tummy first. After a while, I had enough of blueberries, you can only eat so much. And I began to worry, what we would do with all these blueberries. Blueberries on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…

I tried to convince my father, who was picking three rows further that we probably already had enough. He did not even look up, just murmured something unintelligible, and continued to pick blueberries at an astonishing speed.

When the sun began to set, the man in my life came over from the edge of the field. His basket was full, while mine was half empty full. He just grinned at me, words were not necessary. Then we tried to convince the older generation to stop picking. As it turned out, not an easy task. After additional thirty minutes, our harvest was weighed by the friendly lady. We had picked 5.5 kg (12 lb) of blueberries.

And we have been eating them ever since, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…