After my weekly college course on Middle Eastern culture and my afternoon-to-closing shift in Brooklyn College, I went out to a bookstore in New York City to buy a book for Ruthie Henshall for Valentine's Day. It's a Robert Mapplethorpe book ("Pistils") featuring his pictures of flowers. Tulips, roses, and especially the Calla Lily photos. Those pictures are so... peaceful compared to the raw carnality of his previous work of the gay S&M scene from his book "Pictures." Then the book also have pictures of the lily being so wrinkled and dried up, to show the fact that the flower's life (and Mapplethorpe's, as he succumbed to AIDS in '89) is so limited, so finite.