Current mood:

gross

Crocspiracy
This may not seem like the most urgent of topics, considering that I never write here anymore and so a more appropriate choice would be I have overturned the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Here Is My Proof; but there is something else riding the proper balance of frivolous and infuriating, pointless yet provocative, that has been firing up my Reptilian Blog Lobe, and it is, once again, on the subject of shoes.

Like many of you, I used to be sessile. Whenever it was that I first processed that I wasn’t going to be a star athlete, I was like, I dun care that I wasn’ chosen funna team, and my complete lack of enunciation showed how much less I really couldn’t care. But then, jumping over 20 or so years, I became invested in not being in pain all the time. I started doing things so difficult that I thought I might lose my mind. Sitting through yoga classes in which teachers rambled pithily about the “tenants” of their hybrid belief systems and having my personal space invaded by the relaxed errant feet of wearers of tie-dyed lycra —I said tie-dyed lycra— took all my resources. But I persevered. I vanquished the boggart of identity, I smiled through my heart center. I started to feel better.

But then it came to addressing the little matter of my feet. Doing so much yoga made my feet spread out (which I consider a good thing); I turned 30 and immediately inherited a protobunion (obviously: a bad and disgusting thing). Shoes were either too long, to the trippable point, or too narrow. I started searching around on the internet, and found a lot of moralizing advice about “stop deluding yourself” and “you can’t wear stilettos every day!” which made me more and more angry the more I researched and the less I was able to find, and the more these orthopedists were telling me this was my own fault. As it happens, I basically wear sneakers every day, but I wasn’t just annoyed at the Sex and the City assumptions. I was thinking about how many people are probably unable to find comfortable shoes and are hearing this same crap. Here I am, this little person with little wide feet, and I can’t find shoes that fit me right*—what about bigger people with bigger feet and furthermore with bigger orthopedic issues? Scrolling through Zappos’s plus-size selections, wave after wave of fuglitude breaks my heart. It’s like there’s no market for reality. In a country with whatever percent obesity, it can’t be that everybody under ninety has narrow feet.

I inherited my grandmother’s feet, and when I visited her two weeks ago, dealing with spinal stenosis and frequent, horrible nerve pain down her right leg, she was still fixated on her lifelong quest for comfortable shoes. I even wonder about the possible link, since all her problems are on her right side, between a lifetime squeezing her right foot into slightly too-narrow shoes and the damage and misalignment of her lower right lumbar vertebrae. It makes me want to scream.

And, yes, ok, I’m holding out on you, and so is my grandmother. For now, I’m ruling out shoes that we hate, such as birkenstocks or the other unmentionables I’ve written about before. Shoes in the realm of maybe include Dansko clogs. Shoes in the probably department include New Balances, which are apparently the only sneakers in the world now to come in multiple widths. Suggestions are welcome.

Oh. And, also, here's this.