The day was uneventful. I spent the better part drawing circles on graphs for a competitive analysis into the social networking and media-sharing space. Red, blue, green; round and round and round, the companies orbited the exes and whys like lumbering planets struggling to align.
Most of my managers were in Palm Springs for a conference. Halfway through the day, another analyst asked how my everything was going. "Oh, you know, it's pretty slow today." I was obliged to ask how his day was going. "Picking up, picking up. Always something!" he said. Then he left for a two hour lunch.
Round and round and round.
Standing in line for the bus ride home, I read the text etched on one of my buttons: "Label of graded goods, 1993". I peeked at the other buttons. They all said the same thing. I wondered where they've been. Have they gestated in dark boxes for 15 years? Where were they born? When did they arrive in China and stitched themselves into the fabric? They seemed to be part of the same batch, the same family. Did they have another life on another shirt, or was this it, consigned to dark weeks behind a closet door punctuated by brief moments of activity? And what exactly were these buttons graded on?
I tried to visualize the tiny hands that sewed the ivory buttons onto the cotton. I imagined them to be small and rough. Maybe they had delicate tips, ones that perhaps could have danced across piano keys. Or perhaps they were nimble enough for a typewriter, from which could have flowed great poetic masterpieces. Or at the very least, those fingers, bony and strong, could have produced passable presentations about companies colliding with each other.
Round and round and round.