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Unfit For Fashion

I wore high heels and make up last night.  I can’t remember the last time I did that but I do remember, now, why I usually don’t.  I’m a wreck today!

Curse those end of season sales!

I’m not like most women with shoes.  I have very few shoes because I hate breaking new shoes in.  I have a pair of slippers, a pair of plain black flats with closed in toes for winter, a pair of plain black flats with velcro straps for summer, one pair of aqua heels I have worn once and the new high heels I wore last night.

Brownshoe
Brownshoe

Hmm perhaps I am more like most women than I thought.  Just checked to see if I was telling the truth and discovered two pairs of thongs (I think they call them flip flops now), some plain flat sandals and two pairs of brand new, designer imitation, heels that I bought from eBay.

Redshoe
Redshoe
Blackshoe
Blackshoe

I have never worn the imitation designer shoes. They don’t fit.

The only reason I got the shoes I wore last night was because they were just five dollars on a bargain table.  They were in my size and bargain shoes NEVER come in my size so I could not resist buying them.

I have big feet you see.

I went to Thailand for two weeks a few years ago.  I took one pair of shoes and they broke while I was out shopping.  I went into a shoe store to buy some new ones.  The salesman looked at my feet and his eyes popped.  Once he recovered his composure his mouth kept twitching with, I am guessing, suppressed laughter.  The only shoes he had in my size were men’s shoes.  Thai women have tiny feet.  Thai men, as a matter of fact, have tiny feet.  I do not.  The only shoes they had that would fit me were wooden sandals with velcro straps they kept in stock to sell to foreign men.

I could not wander about in Thailand with bare feet so I bought them.  I put them on and walked out of the shop.  As I left I heard the salesman start laughing but I did not turn around.  It would have been even more humiliating to let him know I knew he was laughing at me so I held my head high and strode off confidently.  On feet that seemed positively gigantic to me for several days afterwards hehehe.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  The bargain shoes.  My kids were with me when I bought them and that meant they had to follow me around as I searched for a bag to match the shoes.

I heard, read, or was told somewhere along the line that the genuinely well dressed woman always has matching bag and shoes.  This advice has led to me always buying a black bag and black shoes since black matches any colour you wear.  On the rare occasions when I buy shoes in any other colour I always go searching for a bag to match.  It is one of the reasons, aside from my big feet, why I don’t like buying shoes.

I found a bag that came close to matching my bargain shoes but the look on my son’s face stopped me from buying it.

“What?!”  I said to him.

“You can’t be serious!”  He spluttered.

“Don’t you think it matches?”  I asked.

“Didn’t you say the shoes only cost five dollars?  Wasn’t that the only reason you bought them?  How can you even think about paying 80 dollars for a bag to match a five dollar pair of shoes?”  He demanded.

He had a point so I put the bag down and followed the kids around as they did their shopping.  I got really lucky and found an even better matching bag in another store and it only cost 20 dollars hehehe.

There was another problem though.  I had nothing in my wardrobe that would match the bag and shoes but, since then, I found a skirt.  It cost 110 dollars.  The look on my daughter’s face didn’t stop me from getting it as the colour is no longer in style.  The skirt was the only thing left in the right colour and I still haven’t found a top!  Or trousers.  Or a jacket.  Sigh.  Come to think of it – this could turn out to be the most expensive five dollars I ever spent because it’s also cost me more money in a round-about way.

The hem on the legs of my two pair of black trousers came down one after the other.  I sewed up one pair but, when the hem on the other pair came down, I got impatient.

Word to the wise – superglue does not work on fabric.  It just ruins the cloth.

I went shopping for new black trousers.  The saleslady was good at her job.  She was able to talk me into buying a pair of jeans and a pair of bootleg black pants.  The legs of both are too long.  I figured that would not matter since I now have a pair of high heels to wear with them.

Last night I ignored the fact that the bootleg pants are not the same reddish-brown colour as the heels and I wore them together.  I put them both on and discovered the heels were not high enough.  The trouser legs were still too long.  I am nothing if not resourceful so I hoisted the trousers up as high as I could make them go.  This was enough to get them up off the floor but it did leave me with a bit of a wedgie.

I decided if I was going to suffer for the sake of fashion I should put some make up on too so I pulled out my make up, my glasses and my magnifying mirror and tried to put some on.  It reminded me why I don’t wear make-up!  I think I kept the lipstick inside the line of my lips and my daughter tells me I did not have too much blush on nor were my eyelids different colours but I worry she may have just been being kind!

The worst bit was when I poked myself in the eye with the mascara wand.  Twice.  I have two eyes and I got both of them.  Luckily the mascara was waterproof.

Once I was ready I tottered off down the stairs.  It has been so long since I wore high heels I was terribly grateful the stairs had railings for me to cling to as I descended.  By the time I got to the sidewalk to wait for the kids to pick me up I was already regretting my choice of shoes.

Over the past few years, since menopause, my body has been like my old car – dodgy!

Out of the blue, for no apparent reason, my right knee became painful when going up or down stairs.  It stayed that way for months then, out of the blue, it got better.

A few weeks later, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, a few of the bones on top of my left foot began to cause sudden sharp pains now and then.  I noticed I am inclined to tuck my foot under my leg in an awkward but comfortable position when I am in bed.  I wondered if that was causing the pain so I stopped doing it and the pain went away.

Five minutes in high heels and my knee was hurting again.  So was my foot but I just shifted my weight from foot to foot, resisting the urge to go and get changed, until the kids arrived.

We got to the venue and I saw I had to go up to the rooftop if I wanted to have a cigarette.  One trip to the top caused me to seriously consider giving up smoking at least for the night.  It took me several minutes to recover from the trauma of the trip up all those stairs and my fear of falling off my heels on the way down was just as traumatic!

Every now and then the trousers would slip down and my heels would get tangled up in the hems.  I did a lot of stumbling and trouser hoisting throughout the night.

By the end of the evening my already big feet felt as if they had swollen to twice their size, my right knee was threatening to drop me to the floor every few minutes, my left foot was causing excruciating pain every other step I took and it felt like someone had poked me in the eyes.  Oh wait – someone did – me.

At the end of the night the kids dropped me home and I limped up the stairs to the safety of shoeless heaven!  I got into my nightgown and went to bed.  Sadly for me I made another bad clothing choice when I bought a nightgown that was a size too big.

I almost always buy my clothes a size too big.  It makes me feel thin.  The trouble with wearing an oversized nightgown, however, is that when you roll over you move INSIDE the nightgown.  It does not move with you – it twists itself around you.  I would throw it out but it’s brand new and I can’t bear to waste it so I wear it.  I only wake up if it twists itself so tightly around me I can’t move and that doesn’t happen every night.

When I woke up this morning my whole body was taking revenge.  Sore eyes, sore foot, sore knee, sore back and sundry aches and pains all over.

Curse those end of season sales!

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