This Post Brought to You By the Color 'Green'

I managed to finish off And Then today, which did end as unhappily as I predicted. I think. It's somewhat hard to tell. It all ends in a swirl of red, which I took to mean that he had a) committed suicide b) been killed while in delirium or c) gone mad. Unless there's some other interpretation I'm missing, I count this as an unhappy ending. My favorite, of the options given, is that he was killed in his delirium. I don't think he had enoguh gumption to actually commit suicide, but dying would be an infinitely kinder death to him than continuing to live, mad or not. Plus, there was a mention in the book that it was only acceptable to read about a character who had flouted society for love and like them if they wound up dying in the end. Despite not knowing how much I actually liked the main character, it would be very poetic if that quote came full circle.

I talked to a friend today who has just come back from field research in Mexico. Apparently they camped in an active volcano for over two weeks while they examined the wildlife in the area. If you said, Pardon me? when you read that, then you are in line with my reaction precisely. He explained that it was generally only mild activity - boulders, small lava flows - and that other scientists had been watching for the big explosion that's due to arrive, so they were never in danger. I, of course, was still stuck somewhere around small lava flows. Yet I bravely moved past and listened to how beautiful the area was; it did sound nice, he was in the southern part of Mexico in a tropical forest high up on the lip of the volcano. The only drawback, he admitted, was that every single plant fought back and tried to stick them.

I would like to see a rainforest, though preferably not one in a volcano. I can almost imagine how very green it must be, but not quite because while it's easy to focus on how green one leaf must be, it's harder to get the perspective on an entire glade greener than anything I've ever seen. Still, the 'almost' is a very pretty picture, taken nearly entirely from Alabama forests. When I moved to Alabama from my southern Idaho desert, I decided that green was going to be one of new favorite colors right along with blue when we drove into the very first forest. It would be hard to be indifferent to green living down there, it surrounds you so completely. In the summer, I swear you could have drowned in green, if you weren't so busy trying to figure out what joker had switched out all of the air for water when you weren't looking.