dealing...

so the most horrible day of recent note has come to a close. i'm actually feeling much better. all right, better. if i don't talk or think about it all too much.

i stole more cuttings from the crappy nursery down the way this afternoon. it was revenge. it was petty theft as a morale booster. i took another sprig of the previously discussed dragon wing begonia so mom and i can each have one if we want. i also took a sprig of another big begonia. i think the dragon wing has pinkier blossoms. this one, THIS one, has those huge electric coral blossoms i was remembering. it has simple "angel wing" type leaves; no serration, look sorta like a smoothed out crescent wing thing. its stems are longer and thinner than the dragon wing, and it all has a sort of hung together feel, like i imagine it would look beautiful with the wind rustling through it and all the branches and parts moving gently with the breeze.

by the way, i read "the orchid thief" recently, and though it was quite different than what i imagined it might be, it was a lovely read, and intriguing. as a plant nut, there was a lot to satisfy me, and as a connisieur of beauty and a muser about what beautiful IS, i was quite satisfied. the ideas of all-consuming passion and infatuation, whether or not they make sense or are healthy, are fascinating to me. the idea of a living garden of orchids as these precious gems that people would kill for... intoxicating. the writing is also lush and green, with murky depths spread throughout. and it has the most beautiful image of a lapist's (gem stone carver/keeper) desk, with a box containing thousands of thousands of dollars worth of loose gems in it. tthe idea of such a panoply of wealth that it ceases to even seem real... ah. i love it!

in other musings, i remembered (after much brain searching) the three materials that are called gemSTONES but are in fact the products of living creatures; pearls, amber, and coral. perhaps there are more, but i think those are the big three. there is something even more mystifying and special about these substances than regular stones. they are the strange byproducts of actual living things, that through some fluke of history and human desire have become objects of desire and worth.

and hopefully the reckless plundering of coral has stopped. because the species that are used (named black, coral, and something else for rather obvious chromatic reasons...) for jewelry purposes are rare deepwater specimens, that, because they are living creatures, can be harvested to extinction. and you can bet that being organic substances, they will be a LOT harder to produce in a lab than diamonds or rubies... simple minerals that they are...

and on the subject of manmade gems, i'm all ears for you peoples' theories. i was talking to dad about how i felt that people want these items to have an aura of rarity and struggle, to be authentic and bathed in blood, in an often very literal sense. his response was "how many guys do you see that have a problem with fake tits?" to which i conceded point, game, and match. now i'm not sure. there just seems to me to be something inherently different about some beautiful stone harvested with care from the depths of the earth. the struggle, and the work to find something that was created by geologic accident and is mond-bogglingly beautiful...

on that note, there's a definite sinful air to gemstones. then again, i find a sinful air hanging about all the trappings of wealth, so i'm not a good judge.

by the way, my personal favorite is sapphire, my birthstone, the most overlooked of the fine gems. sapphire and ruby are actually the exact same thing, just different colors. that's why there can be pink sapphires and yellow sapphires. but note that sapphire is the mutable title. there will never be anything but a red ruby, but sapphires can take on any color imaginable. for the stone of virgos and september birthdays, i can think of nothing more telling or fitting.