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.