I'm ambivalent about receiving flowers, especially roses. I guess it's cos an ex persisted in giving me roses despite me preferring tulips. Why? Cos roses can be dried and hence last longer, but tulips can't. That this detracts from the pleasure in receiving them isn't the point.

I watched a fringe film from the Film Fest called "Untitled Part 1: Everything & Nothing", which is a documentary interview with a female freedom fighter detained for at least 10 years in the prime of her youth. In it, she explained that when given flowers, she wouldn't put them in water to keep them alive longer. Cos having made the decision to cut the flowers, preserving them in water would only be an artificial state to prolong one's memory of them. She had this insight when a fellow detention inmate gave her a rose... while she was bound hand and foot in a small room without any water even for herself, not to say the rose. Later on, she pasted the rose on a card to give back to the fellow inmate, but a guard saw the card and burnt it. The freedom fighter said that a rose is still beautiful even when it burns, no?