This cracks me up, in a very flashback to the Chicago F2F kind of way.

As I was typing my post, I thought about the Chicago F2F!

I was ignorant of the slave labor issue when Scott gave me a diamond, and I'm fairly glad of that, because I love it, but had I known, I couldn't have loved it. A ring of any sort wasn't a requirement, though.

I also have my grandmother's diamond. I've kept it in the original setting (although my grandfather gave it to her years after they married).

I am spared any sort of ethical dilemma by failing entirely to see the appeal of diamonds.

I mean, there must be a line for you somewhere that makes it not boxing

When you're on the ground wrestling? Or when you start to use your feet as offense. Really, I've always used boxing as a vague synonym for street-fighting. (And what little I do know about boxing indicates that rule-breaking -- like head-butts and biting -- occur all the time. So "boxing where the rules are being broken" comes into my head before "not boxing" does.)

I find that any of the Really Precious stones are so fraught with "I might lose it!!" that I almost never wear the ones I have. So I'm just as happy to have semi-precious, like garnet, or not-particularly-precious, like cubic zirconia. I can't tell the difference by looking, and the sense of danger doesn't happen.

I have my engagement ring and my great-grandmother's wedding ring. I would have loved gg's ring as my engagement ring, but I love my engagement ring. I picked it out.

Girls old and men get cold....

the appeal of diamonds.

They're really sparkly.

I'm not a big jewelry person. The only pricey jewelry I own are teeny tiny diamond studs in white gold in my ears that were a gift from my parents. My one and only ring is silver. If I were to get a ring, it would be an antique ring with an emerald-cut emerald. But I can think of a million other things I'd rather spend the money on.

Or when you start to use your feet as offense

Ahah. I thought you were responding to my "it looks like boxing until I kick him in the nuts" with dirty boxing, as opposed to not boxing.

I admit to insiderishness, but it hadn't occurred to me, even before I got into the martial arts, that boxing was anything else. Boxing's the sport of punching. So went my semantics, and I'm still good with that.

They're really sparkly.

Lots of faceted gems are sparkly. Some of them are even in colours I think are pretty. Most diamonds, NSM.

And we all lose our charms in the end...