Dear flowers, you capture the best and the worst of the globalized economy. You're so pretty, even the fake ones are pretty, but the real ones are constantly dying. They've got to be harvested and shipped and cut very efficiently, and it's a global phenomenon. Like, there are flowers in my corner market from Africa. These are from China, but because they are plastic, they could just be shipped in a shipping container. More people can afford to apologize by giving their romantic partners professionally cut and arranged roses than in any time in human history, but in that we have lost something, which is that the whole idea of flowers is that you had to go out into the field and like cut them and arrange them yourself to apologize. It's not supposed to be, I'm sorry I forgot your birthday, here's $8 worth of work that was done in Kenya.