Jimmy Stewart’s Come Hither Look

I tried to resist it—I really did. Yesterday, I saw another sexy planet, this time on CNN’s website, a beautiful purple Neptune-like exoplanet. I don’t even know where in the universe it is, but, wow, what a stunner. However, in my attempts to live a balanced life and not fall under the sway of just any importuning god or goddess that beckons, I resolutely closed that CNN window and looked for something else to post. This morning, though, I was still thinking about that beautiful planet and just knew somehow that I’d find enough purple desserts to make anyone weak in the knees if I spent a few minutes looking. Sure enough, purple is an unforgettably gorgeous and dramatic dessert color. It turns out that there are plenty of purple cakes, purple pies, purple macarons, and purple ice creams . . .  And all of them are lookers. My goodness me—who knew?

I’m not sure I can analyze the reasons purple is so devastating in this regard, and I don’t really want to. It should be used more often in cooking, in my opinion, but maybe it wouldn’t have as much impact if it wasn’t so unexpected. Purple is very close to blue on the color spectrum, and both are surprisingly mouth-watering when used in certain ways with food. My mini-photo essay on the sexy Neptune-like planet and a train of accompanying desserts can be found on Wordplay’s Facebook page. There were many other photos I could have included, but you’ll see that for yourself if you go out looking for them.

Eros is really getting to be a problem here on Wordplay, but I haven’t paid Aphrodite her due in a while, and everyone who knows anything about mythology knows how mad that makes her and the lengths she’ll go to when she feels neglected. She’s getting her revenge on me now. Once you open yourself up to it, you start to notice just how beautiful the world is every day, in many ways, despite the ugliness we all have to deal with. Eros is always thrumming along in and behind things, but if you ignore it, it stops paying court to you. I came across a photo of actor Jimmy Stewart on the Internet a few weeks ago, and while I always liked him, I never thought of him as sexy. But suddenly, after a couple of weeks of these erotic planets and Aphrodite-induced dessert binges, I started realizing just how handsome he is in that picture, and it’s just a subtle thing, really, something in his eyes and his smile.

I’m including the picture here, and you’re welcome to agree with me or to disagree about Mr. Stewart’s charms, but if you can withstand the sight of a bunch of artfully scattered pink and purple macarons with flower petals against a dark background, you’re a better person than I am.

Jimmy Stewart. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty/Getty Images

Deconstructing Banana Pudding

For a topic this week, it would probably be difficult to beat Wordplay’s National Dessert Day tutorial on apples, banana pudding, chocolates, and other topics, posted today on the Wordplay Facebook page, complete with photos. Therefore, I won’t try. I thought I’d said all I needed to on desserts, Aphrodite, etc. last week, but when I found out what day it was today, I just had to seize the opportunity. (And really, can you ever get tired of looking at pictures of desserts? Probably not.)

I guess I was also trying to make a point about the impossibility of putting life experiences into separate silos and the lack of neat boundaries between categories of knowledge, experience, etc. If you’re reading this page for the first time, that may sound pretty far removed from National Dessert Day, but if you think in terms of mythology, depth psychology, and layers of meaning, it’s really not. I’m a librarian, too, and while I semi-enjoyed the cataloging class I took in school—which taught us how to organize and classify areas of knowledge—I saw even then that some subjects just don’t fit into a single slot. Some librarians might argue that they actually do if you’re doing cataloging the right way, but I don’t agree. There’s too much overlap between subjects.

I have a fairly strong teacherly instinct, which I’m sure annoys a lot of people (at least, it seemed to in the past), but I have realized that I take a lot of pains to explain things because I have spent so much of my life feeling misunderstood. I don’t mean to make that sound tragic; it’s just a fact that I often felt my experiences were not like those of other people, and that people really didn’t understand my jokes, my references, or even my real feelings about things. I was not always the forthcoming person I am on this blog, and I really was one of those young people I was talking about a few weeks ago who lacked communication skills. Through much of my life, I had a hard time speaking up for myself in person (though never in writing). Actually, what someone said to me once turned out to be true, and that is that you gain greater confidence in yourself by doing. I’m much better at talking now than I used to be.

So I tend to favor clearness in communication, but it’s also true that no matter how clear you try to be, some people will never understand you because they are seeing you through the filter of their own experiences. I don’t like misunderstandings, but they are unavoidable at times, so sometimes you just have to say your piece and move on. I might say something like, “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” and really mean that just as a literal statement of fact based on the weather report. And yet I often feel that people try to read much more into my words than I intended. On the other hand, I often have to caution people not to be “too literal” when it comes to interpreting stories and mythology. Sometimes there is no “literal truth,” but rather a psychological or artistic truth. I’m really not speaking a secret code that other people are supposed to decipher (I would find that extremely tiresome myself) just because I talk about poetry, myths, art, and other things that have layers of meaning. It’s not true that a person named Daphne literally turned into a tree because someone named Apollo chased her, but it is true that it’s sometimes necessary to put your foot down and make a stand.

Others things I learned from National Dessert Day:

1. There are an awful lot of blogs out there on cooking that almost look like someone just made them up and slapped them on the Internet a week ago. It’s not that they are lacking in quality, it’s just that they don’t quite seem real.
2. Banana pudding is one of the most appealing desserts there is to look at; you hardly ever see a photo of banana pudding that isn’t mouth-watering.
3. It takes a little courage to write about food and Aphrodite, as one feels that one is almost bound to be judged, or misjudged, for the attempt, even though you may only be saying what other people are thinking.
4. Fruits are more “erotic” than vegetables, and it’s probably because of the sugar.
5. Some fruits are more “erotic” than other fruits. Never really thought it through in those terms before, but it’s true.
6. Chocolate truffles, according to one source, were named for the truffles that grow in the ground because of the “earthy” appearance of their centers. That never would have occurred to me, though both kinds of truffles are expensive gourmet items.

That’s about it for this week. Thanks for reading, but remember this: if you take an idea from this page and run with it, only to find yourself at the business end of an international crisis, don’t blame me. Learn to be a little more thoughtful about what you read; take a couple of classes or something.