As I've mentioned, I own lots of shoes. Unfortunately, I don't always wear many of them--I tend to wear the same four or five pair, all of them practical and unremarkable, almost every day.
So I decided that during Sunstone, I'd wear some shoes that hadn't been out of my closet in a while. The first such pair was this one.
Long, long ago, when I went to Toronto and saw We Will Rock You with Dale and stayed in the room with the giant blue bathtub, I also visited the Bata Shoe Museum where, I bought these spiffy souvenirs:
The one in the middle is, as you can tell, a key chain pendant. The one on the top is, as you probably can't tell, a hammer: the heel is weighted so you can use it to pound nails, though the friend who visited the museum with me bought one too and said it broke almost as soon as he got it home, when his toddler dropped in on the carpet, so it probably won't work well for hammering nails. The one on the bottom has no function at all; it's just a pretty thing I admired, which, after all, is what Oscar Wilde said is what art really is.
I started this blog entry more than two weeks ago--in fact, in a conversation about this book, I told someone I'd finished the entry and would be posting it the next day--and that was two weeks ago. At the time, I really did plan to post this the next day--but then I looked at what I'd written and decided this book deserves a more interesting and thorough write-up. Here it finally is.
Anyway, here's a meme I've seen going around, along with its rules:
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 123.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
* Do not dig around for the 'cool' or 'intellectual' book on your shelf. Do not go to the other room to find an old textbook. Just pick up whatever is lying at hand.
I grabbed the book I was currently reading: Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil. It is a thoroughly fabulous book and I plan to blog all about it eventually, but for now I'll focus on the chapter in which page 123 occurs: Chapter 5, "War and Wellingtons: Military Footwear in the Age of Empire" by Alison Matthews David.
Last time I posted a picture of shoes, I wondered why I don't buy more colorful shoes. And then, the other day, I was shopping and I found some mustard yellow shoes marked down from $80 to $10.
I thought, huh. Mustard yellow.
It used to be one of my least favorite colors in the world. I didn't like yellow or orange or earth tones in general. But then, about ten years ago, I decided it was stupid not to like a color, because it deprived me of pleasure. So I set about cultivating an appreciation for earth tones. And now I like orange just fine.
Mustard yellow I'm still not all that crazy about...but the shoes were really cool, and they were only ten bucks, so I got them. I'm wearing them even as I type, and they look like this:
It's really hard to photograph your feet at any angle except straight down, by the way. I wanted to show off the nice wedge heels, but it was hard.
A few months ago, as I was browsing the shoe department of some corporate department in my corporate mall, I came across several pair of high-heeled pumps with open work through the body of the shoe. "Those are pretty," I thought. "I would like to own shoes like that."
Then I thought, "Wait a minute. I used to own shoes like that."
And then I thought, "Actually, I am pretty sure I still own shoes like that."
So I went home and checked my closet and sure enough, up on the top shelf, housed in the box they came in, was a pair of blue open-worked high-heeled pumps that I was entirely smitten with when I first bought them--after all, just look at their graceful proportions! Just look at that cool color!
I know that the most common colors for shoes are black and some shade of brown, largely because those are the most practical colors. (I wonder if they're also the easiest to achieve? If black cattle are used to make black shoes, or if leather is always dyed and treated, no matter what the hide of the animal who gave up its skin looked like when the animal was alive?) But given how much I enjoy colorful shoes, like this pretty red pair or this unusual green pair, I wonder why I don't buy them more often.
As I mentioned yesterday, I wore a holiday get-up of green and red for my last day of teaching, and as I planned this outfit, it occurred to me that red tights in the same shade as my skirt might have been better than either the black or cream tights I had to wear. So I went tight-shopping.
And I found diddly. No red tights were to be had in this entire town, not at department stores, not at Target, not even at shoe stores.
However, at one shoe store, I found these:
And as I had a birthday coming up (that's right--I didn't make a big deal about it this year, but my birthday came and went over the weekend), and as baby needed a new pair of shoes, and as they were on sale and fit perfectly, and as I had two coupons I could use to reduce the cost of the shoes so that they were practically free, I had to buy them.
OK, I didn't real need the shoes. And OK, they weren't practically free. But they look really great and I wore them to a party on my birthday and I plan to wear them again soon, so I still think I did the right thing in buying them, and I didn't mind at all about the tights.
I bought these shoes on sale years ago--like, ten--and left them in my closet to age. They were too mannish to suit my taste at that point--I know, I know, if I didn't really like them, why did I buy them? Well, I bought them because they were a super-duper bargain and because they are well made dark green Italian menswear Oxfords, and I knew, I just knew, some day they'd make me really, really happy. Sure enough, about two years ago, I pulled them off a top shelf, realized how awesome they are, and started wearing them with skirts. They are comfortable and a very pretty dark green--did I mention that they're green?
As I wrote Monday, I am really loving my camera. I wanted to come up with some worthy subjects to experiment on, and could think of nothing better than my shoes. This particular pair is among my recent acquisitions. I bought them this summer and unfortunately have not had an opportunity to wear them. I love them: they make my ankles look fabulous and I also like how the insole is pale blue, so that the shoe itself is a beautiful thing even when it's not on my foot.
Yesterday was the first day of classes. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't write much about my job, mostly because I like it well enough to want to keep it. But I figure there a few safe job-related topics, and I'll hit some of those.
For instance, here were some good things about the day:
1. I finally got to wear these fabulous new red d'Orsay pumps
I bought five or six months ago and have never had an occasion to wear. When you get really great new shoes, you can't wear them just anywhere the first time.... But now these shoes have been introduced to society and can go anywhere they want.
2. The M&Ms that have been sitting in my desk since April were still fresh.
3. Someone very kind left a box of lavender jasmine tea and someone else left a bag of goodies in my mailbox.
4. A student rushed into my office with an mp3 and said, "I've been waiting all summer to play you this song about falling in love in a concentration camp. The first time I heard it, I instantly thought of you." I'm not entirely sure I was flattered by that.... I mean, I did talk about love a lot, especially the traumatic kind, in the classes he took with me, mostly because he wrote about it a lot.... In any event, he showed me these features on my computer I didn't even know about and played me this cool song.
