the hard sell

Yesterday I went back to the store to look at the shoes I saw on Friday. I took my friend Eileen, a girlie girl by all accounts, for an honest opinion on them. I mean, I trust my personal likes/dislikes of shoes, owning as many pairs through the course of my life thus far as I have/do. But I'm not especially good with shoes with heels. Or ones that look like a girl should probably be wearing them.

These adorable monsters of a shoe have 3 1/2 inch heels, what would normally be fuck-me height if they weren't wedgies. Whenever I say wedgies I think of "Transamerica", with the transgendered main character proclaiming that anyone can balance on wedgies. We'll just see about that... The wedgie heel is a light lilac with a touch of white. The upper (what little of it there is) has a Parisian scene, complete with Eiffel Tower and a poodle (why are poodles considered the quintessential French dog?). These are kept on by a lilac strap just below the ankle.

I feel dangerous on these, teetering on carpeting, while I make the decision on whether or not to keep them. It reminds me of the shoes the girls wore when I lived in Japan, the platform shoes that would rise upwards of 6 inches. The news once had a story about a girl that couldn't balance on her platforms, fell over, hit her head hard on the concrete from the extreme height of the shoes, and died of trauma to the head. I don't want this to happen to me, to be a top story on the local news. I'm sure they'd bring out the helicopter for a better view of me splayed on the pavement, focusing in on my shoes. "Bill, as you can see from the Chopter 9 camera, her shoes, seen at the end of her mangled legs, are obviously too high for her to walk in. What was she thinking buying those things?! Back to you, Pamela."

But they are really cute. I mean, realistically, I don't need them. I barely go anywhere that requires me to dress up at all, and these aren't the sort of shoes you wear to go for groceries or to the bank. These are event shoes, an event that doesn't require much walking or movement in general. My social calendar currently has no requirements for shoes such as these. They don't make sense.

The problem is my girl friends put on a good hard sell. When Eileen saw them she sort of squealed with delight. I walked around for 15 minutes trying to decide while she used the whole "you can always bring them back" routine. Then I saw Rachel who said she wanted to photograph them because they were so awesome. These were not the things I needed to hear during this most vulnerable time. I was succeptible to flattery. Jill, the big seller at the city's best shoe store, told me not to keep them because I obviously had doubts about them, that it was money I could spend when I'm back in school and broke on a nice dinner or something. I see now why she's the big seller because that just made me want to do the opposite. However, today again I'm seriously thinking of taking off the stickers and adding them to the collection.

I still have 9 days to decide.

The other shoes I got I instantly knew would be fine. Ballerina flats in a light mossy green with white and pink polkadots around the toe. These are more the babysteps towards girlieness that I was thinking of.