Somewhere I Should Never Be

I am baffled. I am in deep baffle. Women’s fashion has always reminded me a bit of pharmacology: I am very glad it exists and personally benefit greatly from it, but couldn’t begin to explain how they pack all the good feelings into those tiny pills. Fashion is wonderful, mysterious, but ultimately, other. And in this pantheon (1), shoes remain the most mysterious and distant.

Which is why it is ludicrous that I am now sitting in my Auntie Caroline’s apartment, surrounded by women’s shoes, trying to decide which ones my girlfriend would like, trying not to get bogged down in how utterly confused I am.

My first reaction to the boots with all the zippers was to try to unzip them. They didn’t work. I have now exhausted my investigative possibilities. I have established that the only defining features of these shoes do not, in fact, function. But were non-functional zippers a good or bad thing?

Then there are the flats. You know, the kind that people are wearing these days that look like princess shoes. But these have large buckles on them. That don’t buckle anything. How about buckles? Were they good? The Puritans thought so…

And so it goes. I’m learning a lot about non-functionality, zippers that don’t zip, buckles that don’t buckle, tie straps that stay tied… I wonder how far away we are from shoes that don’t get worn. Actually, after I saw some of the heels, we might be a lot closer to that eventuality than I had previously thought.

The greatest irony is that in my most recent English lesson (body image), I played devil’s advocate and defended the similarities between high heels and foot binding. So, with that image fresh in my mind, I am now contemplating some 3 inch spikes that my Auntie Caroline described as “sexy dancing shoes.” It is a strange thing when one realizes that they are more of a feminist than their girlfriend. Hmm. So that’s a ‘no’ to the sexy dancing shoes then.

I feel much the same way that an electrician’s 5 year old child would feel, whose father sent him to the store to buy wiring. And so I will do what I think my fictitious counterpart might have: I chose the shiny ones (my budding feminist be damned). I figure that if people want to wear princess shoes, these were the most princess-y. Actually, in my defense, I have no delusions that she would actually wear them, but I do have absolute confidence in my ability mock her with them later.

(1) Along with:
- Armani, the Prophet god of clothing, whose power can reveal great mysteries or shroud all in obscurity
- L ‘Orial, the Trickster god of makeup, who oversees the realms of persona, theatre, and oddly enough, transvestitism.
- Prada, the Warrior god of shoes, whose vindictive nature exacts suffering from his followers in measure to their devotion.
- Denaros, the Allfather, who brought all lesser gods into existence