So, those who know me understand that I am not the world’s most tidy person. My parents often referred to my room as a “dungeon with hidden trap doors underneath all the clothes” until I reached the age of 12, at which point, they realized that no amount of verbal cajoling and weekly stipend could motivate me to actually clean my room. Not much has changed in the 18 years since, other than I now pay a pretty penny for the floor upon which my clothes and shoes rest.
At my office, however, I don’t generally throw clothes willy-nilly around (papers, pens, highlighted, and curse words, yes; clothes, no). I do, however, have a pile of work shoes in the corner, wedged between the end of my desk unit and the air conditioning/heating unit. As I walk to work, I often opt for comfort over couture, pairing my preppy barrister slacks with athletic shoes until I get to my office, whereupon I slip into a pair from my shoe pile. The other day, I happened to look at my shoe pile and notice a shoe that I had not previously seen…a black sandal pump that looked like something that I would actually buy, but did not think that I actually had. I look at it quizzically for a few minutes, because it kind of looked like a heel that I used to have (assuming that the sparklies on my front of old shoe had fallen off, and well, that I hadn’t thrown out those old shoes). I then pick it up and match it against my foot and figured out that it was at least two sizes too small for my foot. I searched in vain for the interloping shoe’s soul-mate, but alas, there was just the single, lonely shoe that had somehow wandered into my shoe pile from unknown origins. I have only one thing to say — “What the fuck?”
Even possibly more disturbing, I explained the appearance of a random Naturalizer shoe in my shoe pile to the fashionable, blond co-worker who sits next door to me, and her response was, “Oh, could it be mine? I have lots of shoes.” She did not seem particularly disturbed that a SINGLE, RANDOM AS ALL FUCK shoe ended up residing in my office, only that one of her shoes had perhaps gotten waylaid. Evidently, if you are willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a pair of shoes, they come with little shoe-residing grasshoppers who have high heel drag races in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping. C’mon!
