The answer is yes, clearly. Flowers make any day brighter. And since I’m not eating vegetables, I figured I’d still buy something at the farmers market. So flowers it is.

These are very fresh and very pretty, a pastel version of the red-yellow-blue primary color triangle. Normally I like my flowers to be more monochromatic or tonal, but this one just seemed to work, and the smell is heavenly.

Now, the funny thing about buying flowers for yourself is the optics. When I was carrying the flowers, everyone I met assumed that someone else had bought the bouquet for me.

Coworker: Oooh, flowers! Nice. Who got them for you?

Me: I bought them for myself.

Coworker: Even better!

You can add a silent “you go girl” at the end. I work in a very liberal office with a bunch of divorced women.

But the assumptions didn’t stop there. After I clocked off on my way home, even the men on my commute thought that someone had bought them for me. When I informed them otherwise, it “wasn’t right” that I should have to buy flowers for myself.

I think the implicit message in that statement was “Well I should be buying you flowers” but I’m gonna go ahead an ignore that, and you can too since you don’t care about my personal life one whit.

I just think it’s amusing that when a woman carries flowers, people of both sexes automatically think that they were a gift (from a man).

This is both endearing and ridiculous. The image of a man buying a woman flowers is deeply ingrained into our societal memory–endearing. The fact that there’s a presumed story behind the simple fact that I bought myself flowers at the farmers market because they looked pretty and smelled good–that is kind of ridiculous.

The moral of the story is, if you’re looking to attract a boyfriend, don’t go around carrying a bouquet of flowers. Contrariwise, if you need to scare off an unwanted suitor (who would back down in the face of competition), buy yourself some flowers but keep quiet about exactly how you got them. If you let other people fill in the backstory of girl + flowers, it will equal boyfriend.

Just for fun, here’s an outtake that I like because it looks like flowers in a spin cycle. I love inadvertent blur in photos.