Skirv's Buttons

The 1994 elections didn't treat me well. My mother at the time worked for Laurel Prussing, the local State Representative (103rd District) who had barely won two years before. This time, with the Republican sweep of the country's offices, Laurel, whom I still respect, was slaughtered big-time by Rick Winkel, whom I still dislike. It was a painful election for my family, and that included me. Especially since I was in high school and had made my motives clear long before by wearing a "Re-elect Laurel Prussing" button for the last several months of the campiagn.

When I was about to leave for school that fateful Wednesday morning, I realized that wearing that button would probably be a mistake. It would be a reminder to those I'd fought with over the matter that I'd lost; then again, not wearing it would be just as much of a reminder. It was tough situation for a kid just learning to grow social that still had a fairly thin skin. So I thought about it for a second, went to my Dad's collection of buttons (he's got thousands of them up all over the walls of what used to be our spare bedroom), and grabbed one - Support Your Right to Arm Bears, if I remember correctly. Then, when I got to school, people just asked what the button was about, and ignored the old and absent political one...

The next day, I grabbed another. The next day, another. For every schoolday thereafter, for the rest of high school, I kept on doing it. And so the legend began.

Dad wasn't overly amused by this, of course - I was taking most of his best buttons just so I could show them off. Mom tried to comfort him by explaining that it was me that was doing it, that it made me really happy, and that this way lots of people saw the buttons; eventually, though, I began to realize that I had to buy some of my own, and that I'd do better if I took some of the more boring buttons too. But I didn't mind - it was the novelty of the thing that got to me, and the joy of doing something that was pretty out there and still interesting and part of my personality...

No matter what I wore, people would walk up to me day after day to see what the button-of-the-day was. It started to become a problem during Phys Ed, when I would insist on leaving a button on my gym shirt. People even began giving me buttons, too, after one day when I forgot to grab one and was forced to staple a sheet of paper saying "this is a button" onto my shirt. And it all culminated in the Shirt of Buttons, worn on the last day before finals, a white shirt completely coated in buttons that I still hadn't worn but had meant to get around to...

This all stopped, of course, with the end of high school. Now that I was heading off to college, such a ready supply of buttons would be out of my reach - a button a day was just too many. As such, I dropped down to one a week. I also picked up a lanyard to hang them on (along with my keys), so that I could wear them with any outfit and not just lose them out of hand. Of course, it made me look like a freak (they weren't in style yet, and wouldn't be for another four years), but such things rarely bother me much.

The process was refined over the years. Certain rules stayed constant: no button may be worn more than once, gift buttons must be worn on receival, while good taste should reign when choosing buttons it doesn't have to, and so forth. I eventually cut myself down from one button a week to "whenever I feel like changing stuff", which helped matters a lot; of course, the number of buttons worn at a time has gone up from the original "one" to a peak of six (semi-)permanents, a watch, a Japanese keychain, the two on each of my jackets, and two to five transients that vary based on mood. Also, while there have been gaps in my button wearing, they mostly have to do with emotional stress - they are a convenient marker to remove, indicating to the rest of the world "leave me alone, I'm broken right now".

And a few hundred of them now hang on my wall, all of which I've worn, and most of which I'm quite proud of. It's my own little piece of art, along with my homepage.

(The current contents of my lanyard are here).