grasswire

One of the things that really changed during my first year at university was my vocabulary. One of the fancy sounding new words that we picked up and would than mockingly infiltrate into our everyday conversations was complementary. It appeared in one of exam questions for sociology where we had to write down complementary social phenomena to a given list of terms. 
This story came to my mind as I realised that I just went through two very similar but than again utterly different days. The morning that G. Bush visited Slovenia I had an interview with one former forreign news correspondent on the topic of covering Third World for an article I would suppose to turn in tomorrow. It was a perfect summer day and the city was swarmed with policemen in their summer outfits, the lucky ones discretely hiding in shadows to avoid the blistering sun. As I was already downtown I made a short stop at the market to buy some strawberries for making jam (see cashmerelady’s post on the subject) and as I came back to the faculty, had an unexpected coffee with a very dear friend of mine. The afternoon was all fun with Tamara in nearby Arboretum. The next day was strikingly similar, only completely different. My second interviewer on the same topic was completely (and disappointingly) different than his former coworker, the policemen were on the streets again, only this time they were completely relaxed as they were securing a bycicle race. The fruit I bought at the market were not strawberries but cherries and back on the faculty, I had another unexpected coffee with a dear friend who could not be more different from my professor/poet friend from the day before. Spent the afternoon with Tamara in the same place again, only this time it was all three of us which made it totally different.

One of the on-line dictionaries defines complementary as “so related that each is the negation of the other” and “providing something that completes the whole”.