Friday, March 17, 2017

Schlumbergera seedling no. 104

Seedling 104 has only produced one fairly short-lived flower, which was sort of orange-red / pink and a bit distorted in shape. It's usually a bad idea to extrapolate too much from a single bloom, but the one is all we've got to work with. Consequently, all the name options refer to this situation in one way or another. They are: How Will I Know, Maybe Never, Needs Practice, and Sleeping Dog.


I don't think any of the names need much explanation, so let's jump to the decision-making.

The attitude that goes with each name varies: Needs Practice is optimistic, Maybe Never is pessimistic, How Will I Know agnostic, and Sleeping Dog is slightly menacing. Probably don't really need more menace in my life, so I can (regretfully) drop Sleeping Dog.1


From there, I guess it's just a matter of determining whether I feel like 104A is ever going to bloom again, and how confident I am that it will look nice if and when it does. Never feels too pessimistic. I mean, it's technically true, but it seems unlikely. So I'll drop Maybe Never. And although I'm not super-optimistic either, How Will I Know is a problem for other reasons, namely the Whitney Houston associations.2

And that leaves Needs Practice. Which I can live with.

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1 Why regretful? Because I had a thing going with the "dog" names -- 060A Wet Dog, 084A Downward-Facing Dog, 113A Helper Dog -- and then I kind of abandoned it. Partly this is because 113A turned out not to be such a bad seedling after all, but also, there haven't been a lot of seedlings since Helper Dog that looked bad enough to warrant a dog name.
2 Not that I necessarily object to Whitney Houston. I've learned, though, that if I name seedlings after songs, it needs to be a song I really, really like, because my brain will take any chance it can get to put a song on an endless loop in my head, whether I like the song or not. This has been a problem to some degree or another already with 022A Sad Tomato (song), 075A Pushover (song), 077B Bad Reputation (song), 090A Lola (song), 099B Karma Cobra (song), 111A Morning Sun (song), 211A Bruce Lee (song), and 281A No Bad Vibez (song). Sad Tomato and Karma Cobra are particularly terrible about doing this.
If I'm going to get Whitney Houston in my head, I'd rather it be "It's Not Right But It's Okay." Which would be a fabulous seedling name, except that it's three characters too long.


1 comment:

grrrlgeek said...

If you still have Sad Tomato, may I suggest: https://youtu.be/z11dA7srESo