I seem to frequently wear the wrong shoes. I’ve done it time and time again. You’d think I’d learn, but out of the 40 pairs I own, and of the four I can find, only 2 are comfortable enough to wear for any length of time without blistering and one of those is a pair of tennis shoes. So, why do I keep grabbing the wrong pair? Why??
A few weekends ago I went down to San Diego to see friends. I hugged my hellos to Margot and she exclaimed on how cute my shoes were. The cuteness factor is in direct proportion to how much they will hurt later. I guess the only thing to figure out is how long you have before your toes are curling and bloody. Someone should come up with a formula. Anyway, we were walking into the closest furniture store and I had just got done telling Margot about how amazing it was that my shoes didn’t hurt at all and how wonderful it was to wear shoes that didn’t hurt my feet that were ALSO CUTE and she said something about how that was so nice because she had a very similar pair to the ones currently on my feet that she could only wear for an hour or so with limited actual walking before they hurt her very much, and then it happened. It was like someone turned the switch to PAIN and my feet started hurting. Besides embarrassing, because of my most recent platitudes, it was painful and required an extra trip to her house so I could swap the cute shoes for my flip flops.
And this is just one incident of many. Too many to tell. But I’ll tell you one more. Over the weekend I wore my flip flops for an extended amount of time while we walked all downtown Santa Barbara, all the while pinching my big toe and the one next to it in a very particular fashion to keep my shoe on my foot as we walked. I didn’t notice until we were about a half mile away from home how much my ankle hurt. I started paying attention, as I walked, to the particular pinching of the toes thing and how it was hurting my ankle but even as I concentrated, I couldn’t stop. I just forged on and kept walking and wincing. The next morning, my right ankle was swollen and had a lovely shade of blue going on the outer side.
All day Saturday I reaped the fruits of my labor and wore a pair of tennis shoes that look like this. Good thing I didn’t waste time and money on a pedicure that no one would see. I wore them to the beach. No sand between my toes except the sand that made it inside my shoe, inside my sock and exfoliated the tender skin in between my toes as I walked home.
I seriously only wear four pairs of shoes. My tennis shoes, one nice pair of black pumps for skirts, my well-worn flip flops and the cute shoes that hate me. I used to wear an awesome pair of green and black checked Vans but I stepped in gum and couldn’t get it off the side so I don’t wear them anymore. But I haven’t thrown them away, either, even though I know I won’t wear them. I haven’t even been able to find the huge box of shoes that my daughter packed for me when I moved. It’s somewhere in the garage hiding under other items I don’t use. An entire box, 4-feet high, full of shoes I’m not wearing. I don’t even miss them because if I did have them out and in my closet, I’d just do what I used to do – try them on, decide they are cute, walk around the room a few times looking for my wallet and my necklace and then take them off before I even go downstairs because they already hurt, replacing them with my flip flops or my tennis shoes.
Someday, when I finally find that box and give those shoes to Goodwill, I’m going to make a person with size 10 in women’s shoes very happy. But their toes will hurt and they will have blisters.
could we have a picture of the cute shoes, please? because if they’re the ones I’m thinking of, they really are cute.
or maybe you actually have more than one pair.
for what it’s worth, i have had good luck getting gum out of fabric using nail polish remover. astonishingly good luck. not sure if the gum is on the fabric part of your vans or on the rubber sidewalls. but there it is.
sorry about your shoe woes. er, ish-shoes.
is it weird that i am thinking of ways to save your vans? cold water soak perhaps?
i have a foot thing too, shoes that hurt me. i wonder if there is some kind of mind/body connection in which my feet try to remind me of days gone by.
I so have the sucky-shoe/hurty-feet problem. I’ve suffered, and now recovered from (fingers crossed in hope), plantar fasciitis which required me to wear only tennies and shoes with a lot of support. Life is not the same without cute shoes. There may, in fact, be a direct relationship between the loss of cute shoes and the pursuit of the perfect bra. I’m doing the research now.
I do that, too. I have a lot of shoes that I can’t wear due to pain/bloody toes/blisters/imps of satan pinching my feet. I’m a sucker for a cute shoe, too. Stupid feet.
oh. i do that too. thirty pairs of shoes and i wear my black earth shoes, flip flops and converse.
huh. and i’m a size 10 too. i smell conspiracy.
I totally do that too. And I am a size 10! You, Michelle and I should get together and send all our size-10-shoes-that-don’t-fit to the same Goodwill.
And people wonder why I live in flip flops, Crocs, and the best ever – mah boots. (which believe it or not are the equivalent of walking on a cloud).
A cloud that says “HOWDY!” and “lawsies”
oh i totally have this problem. which is why at the end of the day i only have two fashion choices when it comes to shoes: flip flops. sneakers. that’s it.