In the beginning, there was the button. It was a cute button. It had meaning.

In particular, it was handed to me at the first BarCamp by Min Jung after she had made it. I was handed a few other buttons (one with the SFist logo from Jackson, and both Catster and Dogster logo buttons from Ted), but the only one that stuck was the BarCamp one. Dents, misshape and all.

A few weeks later, I attended and volunteered at the Webzine 2005 independent publishing conference, receiving a volunteer pin. The pin is great, but it doesn't say anything about Webzine, which kinda sucks.

But I liked the pin. So, I stuck it, and the first one, on the tightening strap of my backpack.

Soon after that, on a train ride up to the City with Cal, I met Heather, and George, I managed a Flickr button, which was quickly followed by a Laughing Squid button from Scott.

Each of these buttons had meaning to me. Each one had a memory that I wanted to keep, hold on to. Each button represented a moment of my life, each one wonderfully happy, in an internally dark time of my life.

So, when David asked about buttons, I jumped at the chance to order some for Super Happy Dev House. I placed the order through One Inch Round, as they had cleverly put their URL on the Webzine buttons as subtle advertising. Clearly it worked, and we had little SHDH logo buttons.

Entertainingly enough, a month or so after we had buttons at SHDH, I saw one on a backpack carried by someone I didn't know. Yay! The buttons were getting around. Way cool.

I also made buttons for my company, CodingClan. I like the logo a lot. *grin*. Yeah, the logo was my idea.

When Mike and I went to the Make festival in April, I really wanted a button for the memory. I bought two sets, one orange and one flowers. I kept one of the orange ones for my bag, put a monkey one on Maeryn's walker (the little monkey!), put an orange one on Kris' bag to remind him of me, gave one of the flower buttons to Megan by bullying her into taking it, and put one of the flowers on Annie's collar. I wasn't as attached to these buttons, as they didn't have the strong association with a memory the other buttons did.

However.

The buttons are small. They're cute. They are infinitely collectable.

And I am tragically drawn to them.

Way way way tragically so.

I found Kathryn Yu's website via some indirect Flickr friends (and the immediate attraction of her first name, how could I resist peeking at her site? Answer: I couldn't), and visit daily now. Mid May, she had a link to El Boton, Purveyors of Buttons, Pins, Badges and Limited Edition Button Sets.

Well, crap.

Four clicks, two through Paypal, and I have myself two sets of really neat buttons: The ROYGBPP ones, and the Web Designer collection. No associations with them, just some neat buttons.

Neat buttons that are going to sit in my desk drawer. Just sit there. Well, sit there until I open my drawer, see them there, pull them out, look at them, smile, then put them back.

Every time I see the buttons on my backpack, I smile. I look at these other buttons. I smile, they make me happy. Silly little things, they make me happy.

But I don't want to start collecting them. I don't want to have a box of buttons that I've spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on, only to give them away 10, 20 years from now. What did your aunt collect when she was younger? Oh, buttons. Ugh.

Kris didn't help much, either. Etsy is a handcrafted item marketplace where artists can sell their wares. There's a huge list of 1" buttons available. Some are crappy (okay, a lot are crappy), but some are cute or entertaining (these being fonts from Tom7), or oddly interesting. I went out and purchased a circle cutter to cut out 100 circles to have 100 buttons made for $10.

Clearly insane.

When I commented to Kris that I was going to get a circle cutter so that I could make Mischief logo buttons for the team, his response wasn't, "Hey, aren't you trying not to spend money?" it was, "Cool! I want one!"

For the love of god, husband, put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

If the dishwasher is full of clean dishes, put them away, then put your dirty dish into the dishwasher.

If it's full of dirty dishes, start the wash cycle.

I don't think I quite understood the unbridled joy my mom experienced when she finally trained us kids to put our dishes in the dishwasher instead of just the sink.

That is, until now.

Today I received an email with the subject:

Subject: We cure any desease!

My first thought when I saw the subject was, "Huh. Except stupidity."

Last night was prom. My date was the self-proclaimed Worst Prom Date Ever, which is to say, the organizer, and not really the worst prom date ever (unless you include the abandoning in the middle of prom, the pizza dinner, the forced labor and the sour towel, then maybe). Actually, I'm exaggerating for effect, Roshan did get me a beautiful red rose corsage (passion!), and really wasn't the worst date ever: he left me for his girlfriend (reasonable, considering I was forewarned), the pizza dinner was very tasty, the decorating committee needed the extra two sets of hands and the towel was presumably clean.

I showed up late at his house, the truck having recently gone out in the Great Grand Birthday Sandbox Adventure with Mike for Liza. We dashed off to get a keg, then another keg, and another one. If you ever decide to purchase a keg from a microbrewery, standing at the back gate, rattling it, howling at the top of your lungs, "WHERE IS MY KEG!?" won't endear yourself to the staff. Neither will trying to crack their combination lock. Even if you've already paid for said keg.

The combo is 0351, by the way.

We dashed off to Mitchell Park after stopping by Roshan's house to pick up the rest of the alcohol. I had two awesome cookies, baked by Roshan's housemate, Matt, who was his high school prom king (and, well, looked the part). We arrived first at the community center, and started unpacking the alcohol into the mini-gym/dance floor/hall. As we were finishing up, the decorating committee arrived: Joy, Lisa, Eric, and three others.

The decorations were blue cellophane sheets hung all around the walls, with hand crafted fish, lights and streamers. The fish were amazing. Personally, I would have drawn one of the fish, colored it, taken it to Kinko's, made fifty copies, then cut them out. Instead, Lisa cut out and glued each color out of construction paper, and these things were seriously detailed. Incredibly impressive.

We had arrived early to give the band cashola and spent a little time talking to one of the band members. She was reviewing the lyrics of the songs I think Roshan had asked them to play. She looked at me and said, "I've never heard of half these songs." I chuckled at the time, and later realized, when she was singing back up to the songs, that, well, she hadn't know half the songs because she was in kindergarten when they were first released. I, on the other hand, was in high school. Punk kid.

People started trickling in at 9, when prom was supposed to start. Roshan commented he really needed to tell people 8, since no one showed up until 9:45 anyway. A friend of Roshan's showed up on time, and so spent some time talking to me. My teammate Adam showed up soon after, with his date. When he realized no one had really shown up yet, he left. I turned to AJ, the guy I was talking to, and said, "Yeah, his real prom was about 3 weeks ago." AJ responded, "Heh. I guess this prom isn't much of a novelty for him then." "Yeah, unlike us whose prom was over a decade ago."

He turned to look at me, shocked. "Over a decade?"

I didn't have the heart to tell him, yeah, actually closer to two decades.

Eventually, Kris and Katie (yay, a date for my husband!) showed up, with Doyle and Heather. Doyle spent what seemed like the first hour on his cell phone with Brynne, who was saying crazy stuff, almost giving him permission to make out with Heather, or something like that. I think Brynne was drunk. Warren, Jess, Jess, Beth, Forker!, Paul, Shwu! and other teammates and friends starting showing up, which made the evening much better, my date Roshan being off playing host and spending time with his other date. She didn't seem to appreciate my presence, refusing to dance with me. Which entertained me to no end, with her being the "other woman" from my perspective.

Around midnight, I took off the 3" strappy heels Heather loaned me to go with the amazing dress she loaned me. It took me that long to realize that 1. I can't walk in 3" heels, no matter how much I like to pretend I'm a girl, and 2. 3" heels do not help an injured knee.

Katie sat next to me while I rested my feet, and we talked for a bit (where talking amounted to screaming at each other over the music). At one point, she yelled over to me, "Whatever you do, don't look to your left."

Which caused me to look to my left immediately.

And catch a woman with her head buried into the crotch of the guy standing in front of her, his belt undone, and his pants unzipped.

I immediately turned back to Katie, "Aaauuugh!" She laughed. The couple spent the next hour in some sort of connected body contortions. We were able to catch a picture of the two of them only after they had sufficiently untangled themselves. Good times.

All in all, a fun night. Strangely enough, the amount of alcohol consumed per pound of flesh at this Prom was remarkably similar to the amount of alcohol comsumed per pound of flesh at my high school prom. About 60 bottles of wine and maybe 20 glasses of beer were consumed by about 120, maybe 140 people.

Yeah, that's about right.

My Flickr photos of Prom || My Gallery photos of Prom

Or what I wish someone had taught my date in high school.

If ever on a date, say, a prom date, and stressed because the truck to get the kegs showed up late, and the decorations are supposed to start going up at six, but there's no one at the gym at six, so you're really busy setting up the gym, and, say, your date says something like, "Oh, no! I've lost my N!" (assuming, of course, N is something physical that you can help your date find, and not something intangible, like, say, your date's virginity, this being prom and all), the proper response is not, "Oh, that's too bad."

The proper response is some variation of, "Oh no! I'm really stressed right now, helping set up this whole prom/party, but I want to help you find your N. I'll come help as soon as I'm able."

Your date will be much happier, and less annoyed at you.

Later in the evening, after the decorations have gone up, the band is ready, and people are arriving, and you're greeting all the newcomers individually, because you can, there are so few, if your date is next to you during the greetings, definitely do introductions. When said introductions are over, do not continue the conversation with your guests by turning your back on your date. The first time you do this, it's an accident. The fifth time, it's bad manners.

If necessary, place your hand on your date's hip. The placement will force you to be turned slightly towards your date, and to include your date in conversations.

That said, prom was on Saturday night.