fashion fucked

I'm not a fan of feet and toes, certainly not my own. Other people's I'm more neutral on, except when they are very alarmingly, disturbingly diseased looking bad. In general, I find I am more charitable in my assesment of other people's feet than I am of my own. I don't like the shape of mine and my toes strike me as looking freakishly long, boney, and skinny. They sometimes dislocate themselves just for the hell of it. The most embarassing time this happened was while I was high school aged and on the phone with a boy...I dropped the phone, yelping in pain. When I finally retrieved the phone, it was to mutter something like "My um, toe just went out of joint...I, uh, I have to go now 'cause I think I'm gonna pass out."

My toes have not been kind to me although I have tried to be nice to them, at least in recent years. I have tried painting them, thinking this might help. Somewhat but not enough to make me comfortable with the fashionable open toe sandals. It occurs to me that I'm fighting a lifetime of toe shame and training to be shod. The neighbors' kids ran around shoeless in the summer providing us with a model of barefooted barbarism which we discouraged from emulating. Our elitist parents had raised us to believe people like the neighbors' kids were idiots whose brains had been rotted by too much TV and a diet which included sugary cereal, Tang, and wonder bread.

To make matters worse, our mother the nurse had informed us of parasites that live in the ground and burrow up into the bare feet of morons like the neighbors' kids. She neglected to mention the rarity of hookworm infections in northern climes. We believed her. Why not? They did drink Tang after all.

Having been brought up to see barefootedness as a symbol of an unredeemable philistine nature helped along my budding aversion to the notion of exposing what I thought of as my nearly deformed ugly feet. Going to college changed that somewhat. I had to adapt to the many hippie kids who walked around campus and came to class bare foot. Their one concession was birkenstock type sandals, worn even in the winter (on the bitterest days worn with rag wool socks). I still never got the urge to be habitually bare foot in public though.

For most of my life, this was not a serious problem. It was possible to buy sandals that allowed me to keep my creepy toes safely out of the public eye. All that changed some years ago when the "hooker shoe" look took off. Black leather skinny strap sandals over (usually) tanned feet with bright red painted toenails look especially ridiculous on aged baby boomer white suburban women wearing pastel skorts and striped jerseys. To complete the scene, imagine some beach boys music blaring from a restaurant speaker, oil slicked boston harbor water slapping the dock which resembles nothing nautical as much as it does a strip mall surrounded by an armada of bright shiny midlife crisis boats, and a wide flat rear end looming ever closer to your bucket o' fried clams which rocks precariously on the cheap plastic table as the hooker footed woman shimmies in time to a beat that apparently only she can hear. Ah, summer at the marina.

And now there is no escaping the open toe. I have tried. Each summer I pray that the open toe sandal trend will come to a close but alas, each year it is reintroduced as if it were something new and exciting.

- One look that might take some getting used to is hosiery with open-toe shoes.
- By the way, open-toe works nicely right through fall (if you're cold, wear tights, it's a new look!).

No, it's not. I recall this look from the days when I saw women on TV exercise shows wearing long sleeved earth toned leotards and pantyhose (think fitness before Olivia Newton John's Physical and Jane Fonda's workout tapes). It's not a new look. It's an old look that thankfully had died a quiet death. It needn't be revived. Not everything retro is cool.

The only people who can possibly enjoy this years long and still growing obsession with open toe shoes are pedicurists.

On top of my issues with my own feet and exposing them, the impracticality of this trend offends my sense of, well, practicality. I was in New York two years ago for a conference in August. It rained buckets all week, and there they were, armies of open toe sandal wearing women, slogging through the urban creeks and streams that flowed at the edge of each sidewalk, seasonal rivers which crested at crosswalks, turns, and potholes in a scummy froth which only a Tang drinking hook worm addled fool would plunge their naked flesh into. Hell, the other week I saw several hospital support staff members wearing open toe shoes. Oh my god, you just don't want to do that. Sick people, fluids, etc. I won't go into details but there is a reason hospital floors aren't usually carpeted.

I'm keeping my feet covered, even if it means doing extra work to find the closed sandals. It's a comfort level thing, emotional and physical. For someone who used to spend summers debating combat boots or high tops, sandals are enough of a capitulation to the heat's effects on my arthritis. I refuse to be fucked by fashion into putting my toes out where they simply don't belong.