"Oh my God- I am out in public wearing two entirely different shoes!"
This was my revelation yesterday in the middle of the K-Mart parking lot. And oh, there was no getting around it. One foot was definitely sporting a flip-flop. The other, a black ballerina flat.
What led to this obvious error, you might ask?
TOO MUCH WEEKEND.
No, no, it's not what you're thinking. My excess shoe variety wasn't a result of a wild, reckless Memorial Day bender where even the traditions of sensible footwear were sneered at with crazed abandon....
Remember, I'm too much of a big ol' goody-two shoes (ha! pun intended) to actually be that exciting.
No, the lack of shoe harmony was because during weekends and vacations, I make the mistake of taking on too much. And this results in things like gouged eyelids, and traction, and more bandages than a Boris Karloff Mummy Lookalike Party.
Why, twice on vacations, I have underestimated the distance on a map and determined that what would be really FUN and GOOD EXERCISE and a GREAT WAY to get SUPER photos would be to WALK the distance. The last time was when my friend Scoobie and I road-tripped to Cape May to go antiquing and to the beach.
Looking at the distance between the hotel and Sunset Beach, I thought we'd be there in a jiff. No problem! It's only, like, a quarter of a centimeter away!
An hour and a half later in blistering July, we made it down to the ocean-- Scoobie in her sensible tennis shoes and me in these cute pink flats-- and I realized that the reason the back of my heels had finally stopped throbbing was because they were covered in blood, and the blood was nicely reducing the friction on my heel.
This is the way I relax.
So the weekend was a bit like that, with me running errands while wearing cute new shoes-- (ah, the evil lure of cute shoes... Dante's tenth level of Hell involves attractive, impractical footwear, I'm sure of it)-- and coming back with one heel so raw, neighborhood butchers were cringing and vomiting at the sight of me.
Monday morning, this led to my wearing flip-flops and crop pants to work, since anything touching my heel like loafers... or the brush of a jeans leg... or, say, a good breeze... made me scream and pass out.
Only I can't DRIVE with flip-flops. So this quickly evolved into popping on one regular shoe to work the gas/brake pedal, and having to do a very Mr. Rogersy sort of shoe-transition when I got to work....
You know IF Mr. Rogers had spent the weekend walking around the neighborhood for ten hours in unbroken-in tennies until his feet were oozing stumps.
And see, this was my downfall. Because-- while a very good system in general-- it had not been PRACTICED and PERFECTED.
So thinking I would stop by K-Mart on the way home from work, I was focused on what I needed in Marthastewartland and not so much on how I planned to get inside it.
And so, my friends, I leave you today with this bit of wisdom:
When the shoe is on the other foot, and it drops, make sure it matches the first shoe before it falls, because you just can't understand a person until you walk a mile in another man's ballerina flats and by then, you're really, really, REALLY far away without Band-Aids.Thank you.
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PS-Over at Humor-blogs, they're bound to stick their foot in it!
