Hubby’s Shoe Adventure

Hubby had the quasi-ignorant opinion that I could find the perfect shoe if I knew where to look.

Let me outlay the criteria for you:

Comfortable.
Flat heel.
Decent tread.
Hard-wearing.
Leather sole. 
Size 9-10.
Sandal. 

Yeah, I have big feet. And no, I can’t go to drag shops for shoes because (a) I don’t know where any are and (b) I suspect they’d be full of 9-inch heel FMB’s. I can not wear heels. If I try, one of my ankles decides it’s Fuck the InterNutter Day and goes sideways at the most inconvenient moment when I’m moving at the fastest plausible speed.

I gave up on heels after the third time I damn near broke something personally painful.

Now, in the intervening years since the last time I visited Shoe-Shopping Purgatory, some nitwit in the advertising and marketing arena has decided that everything can be a sandal.

Let me set this out for you:

A shoe with anchor points on either side of the toes only is a Mule. Mules are for people who don’t lift their feet when they move, because if you try to lift your feet whilst moving and wearing Mules, you will soon be barefoot and your footwear will soon be airborne.

A shoe with three anchor points, one between the big toe and the other toes, and two on either side of the foot is a Thong, or a Flip-Flop if you’re hopelessly American. Thongs are for people who walk like chickens and automatically grip with their toes when they lift their feet. If you forget to do that, you quickly become barefoot, etc. etc.

A shoe with straps across the foot and the back of the heel is a Sandal. Sandals are for people who like air on their feet, but dislike the risk of flying footwear when they have to move fast. Sandals are made to not come off without some conscious effort on behalf of the wearer.

A shoe with no holes all the way around (except the hole for the foot to go in and maybe one for the toes to peek out) is an actual SHOE. It is not a Sandal because it has solid fucking sides, you moron.

…you can tell I got a bit tetchy in the accumulated sandal departments, can’t you?

In my continued journeys from shop to shop to shop… I learned something interesting.

Apparently, you need to swap shoes every day to both extend the life of your shoes and improve the health of your feet.

What. The. FUCK.

It’s bad enough I have to drop nearly $200 on a pair of goddamn sandals - my entire week’s food budget, mind - but TWICE?

Gyah.

Hubby was determined to make sure I could never bitch about my feet again, but we still went looking for cheaper alternatives.

Solid heels are the go. Or at least, solid insert-material-here heels. If they’re attached to a different substance, the risks of painful substructure rise astronomically.

And in an effort to be complete, he lead me into a Crocs shop. It literally stank.

My God, you could smell the carcinogens. It was thick in the air, an almost visible miasma of slow death in the making. I tried to breathe as little of it as possible whilst also attempting to encourage hubby to hurry the hell out of there.

I can’t for the life of me imagine why people linger in there. Augh.

Besides, plastic is also evil because it’s made from petrochemicals, an increasingly rare resource that is also polluting our environment. I could not, would not, endorse Crocs.

We eventually found cheaper salvation and some rather pretty proper sandals at a chemist’s, and then Athlete’s Foot. Yes, I’m wearing rubber soles, but they’re solid rubber. The likelihood of them picking up sharp things and embuggering my feet is small.

Besides, rubber can be made naturally and is therefore renewable. Not saying it is now, I have no idea how synthetic rubber is made… but it can be again when they run out of oil.

And cost - damn near $300 all up. And that was the CHEAP option.

Hubby said my perfect sandal would be solid rubber sole on cork padding. I said it’d be better with something impenetrable between said rubber and padding.

They don’t make it, alas.

And even if they did, they’d never sell it here.

I fucking hate the industry.

Planned Obsolescence is Crippling Me

Every girl loves shoes, right?

We’re stereotypically obsessed by them. All girls allegedly want to be Imelda Marcoss when we grow up.

Not me.

I’m apparently one of those rare women who want shoes that work and last. Looking pretty is icing on the cake. I’m going to spend all day in these suckers and I do not want pinched toes or sharp decorative bits or heels that make my trick ankles go off - resulting in a foot turned suddenly and painfully to the side.

The sole of one’s foot should be parallel with the ground, not perpendicular. Especially when one is in motion.

You have no idea how hard it is to find a ladies’ shoe that fits the following criteria: hard-wearing, flat-heeled, having a decent tread, long-lasting and comfortable.

I swear there’s someone in the ladies’ shoe industry who’s completely misogynistic and has decreed by law that all ladies’ shoes should hurt women in some way.

I thought I had found an ideal sandal in Colorado. It looked okay, it had a decent tread on the sole. It was not balanced on a tiny little spike of a heel and it had lovely cork padding to comfort my aching feet as I ran around doing things.

It had a plastic sole, but I thought I could deal with that.

I obviously thought wrong.

Fast forward two and a half years, and my weight and compounded abuses have compressed the cork quite a bit. Once summer rolls around, I wear these shoes goddamn everywhere. I run in them. I shop in them. I walk around and do all the ordinary things in them. I have them to the point where they almost put themselves on.

And that’s the point where a hidden design flaw started to injure me.

See, plastic soles don’t naturally mesh with anything. you have to have surface area so whatever you’re gluing them to stays glued. Which usually means the “inside” surface of your plastic sole has a big, rigid + across the heel.

Fine when it’s new.

When the shoe gets old, the distance between the centre of that “plus” and the customer’s heel gets shorter. It starts to directly effect the foot.

In my case, I now have bone bruises on my heels because of something that’s designed to fail.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The sandal still looks great. You can’t see anything wrong with it. The plastic sole still looks just as good now as the day I bought it with the shoe. However, the nice padding between that plastic sole and my good self has worn down in the center, where my heel strikes.

That center is exactly where the “plus” is.

Guess what’s been impacting my heel every time I take a step?

So every time I walk, I injure myself. It’s at the point where it hurts like walking on nails whenever I have to get up.

Anyone who’s never had a bone bruise may be laughing at me now. But let me tell you, they’re as painful as all shit. And they keep being painful. Trust me, you don’t know what you’ve got until it hurts like a stabbing when you sit and rest, and it hurts like a stabbing when you put your weight on it.

And you have to rest the injured area for months. No chance of that, I’m a mum. Mums don’t get to rest.

So now I have another category in my ever-lengthening list of things to avoid when I’m shopping for shoes.

No fucking plastic soles!

They are evil.

Could someone tell my why shoe shopping is supposed to be fun, please?