You'd Better Be Staring At My Buttons...

When I was in college, I had a fairly extensive collection of "buttons," by which I mean "those random pins that people everywhere had plastered to their jackets and hats," also known as "flair."  It was the 80s--what can I say?  We all wore crap like that.  At least my hair wasn't jacked up every day with 3 cans of Aqua-Net like some people I could name; neither did I routinely wear my undergarments on the outside of my clothing.  But I had a thing for the button pins because they provided a pithy way for me to express my inner anarchist smartass.

The pins were a convenient way to express my personality without being too "in your face" about it or doing something semi-permanent like dying my hair purple.  Unlike other people, I didn't actually wear them all over my jacket but instead tended to sport only one or two that were carefully selected to reflect my mood du jour. 

Some of my favorite buttons were emblazoned with statements like:

"Excuse Me...Could You Tell Me How To Get To The Real World?"

"Reality Is The Leading Cause of Stress"

"Currently Seeking A Country To Rule"

"Women Who Think They Are Equal To Men Lack Ambition"

"Accepting Reality Is The First Step To Insanity"

"I Don't Mind If You Smoke, If You Don't Mind If I Shit In Your Shoe"

"Reality Is For People Who Lack Imagination"

"I'm Naturally Blonde, Please Speak Slowly"  (Well, naturally reddish blonde, anyway.)

"You're Only Young Once -- But You Can Be Immature Forever"

"If Your Life Is So Exciting, Why Are You Reading My Button?"  (Replace "button" with "status" and you have your next update on Facebook.)

"A Woman Who Doesn't Change Her Mind Doesn't Have One"

"This Garment Is Made Entirely Of Animals Who Committed Suicide In The Wild"

"Stress:  The Confusion Created When One's Mind Overrides The Body's Basic Desire To Choke The Living Shit Out Of Some Asshole Who Desperately Deserves It"

I had several others as well--still do, in fact--including the cutesy, the sarcastic, and the generic.  I didn't wear them much past undergrad, though; I had a feeling the great bastions of grad school would have looked upon them unfavorably.  Maybe if I'd had these instead:

Something tells me that the English graduate department would still have frowned on these--with the possible exception of my old mentor Dr. Irwin Weiser, known to one and all as "Bud."  With a name like Bud Weiser, one has to have a decent sense of humor.

And for all of you who are sitting out there laughing at my predilection for snarky buttons, I have just three words for you:  "Facebook Flair" and "PINTEREST."