Chiaroscuro
What is it about opposites that seem to bring out the deepest flavor in one another? In baking, always one adds a little salt to sweet things, and in cooking often a little sugar to salty or savory things. A drop of vanilla in the hot chocolate is what it was missing.
You see this everywhere. In the tiny woman with the 6 ft.-plus man scenario, which I know infuriates tall women everywhere, but is somehow irresistible to both parties. Don't get me wrong, I don't invariably go for tall men (just usually), but when I date guys who are closer to my own height, there is always some other opposite factor about them - usually their personalities.
Sweet and spicy work well together, too, though I am not certain they are opposites, exactly. That particular combination was brought to mind by my having baked a gingerbread tonight for a friend's birthday. It's cooling on the counter right now, making the joint smell like something out of fairy tales. The witch's house in Hansel and Gretel, I expect. Which would make me a witch who eats children? No, I suppose not. I am not so big on meat, these days.
But anyway, that exceedingly spicy gingerbread will be iced with a cloyingly sweet (and brandy-drenched) glaze, and the result, I assure you, sends it into a higher realm of existence.
Yin yang bright dark blonde black old young and yes, I suppose, life death, which may, after all, have something to do with why we are as a species so very drawn to our opposite numbers.
I was watching Harold and Maude tonight. If you've never seen it, well, I can't make you, but I will tell you this: a lot of what I would like to say about life is in that movie, and it comes out of Dame Maude's mouth. In fact, if you add a few decades to me, that is probably approximately what you will get, if I am lucky, and minus her plan for her 80th birthday celebration.
There are a lot of these sorts of juxtapositions in that film, which is itself both bright and dark, and it always gives me to think. And there is one scene that always, but always, makes me cry. See if you can guess which one (hint: it's not the obvious).
It used to infuriate me - the tall man/short woman thing - as a very tall chick, I felt proprietary. But then I noticed that a) my female friends were frequently exceptionally short or exceptionally tall and I think now that there is something in the extremes that finds affinity. And b) when I have gone out the really tall men - much taller than me even, impossible as THAT is - it nice to kiss up, but we're both so used to being the biggest thing in any space we don't fit gracefully together. Also c), I seem to be most attracted to men actually an inch or three shorter than me - in terms of both mechanics and what I am instinctively rather than intellectually drawn to.
I was just talking about this last night with my friend P - who is an inch taller than me and has refused to sleep with me on the grounds listed above - when he's been with girls his own height, its been weird and awkward.
If that's not TMI ;)
"For me they will always be glorious birds..."
My favorite movie ever. I watched it almost every day of my sixteenth and seventeenth years.