How to talk yourself in a circle.
There is only one 4-letter word in my book.
And that word is 'shoe'.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/fashionnews/6813789/Woman-more-likely-to-remember-first-pair-of-shoes-rather-than-first-kiss.html
I read the above article today stating that 92% of women remember the first pair of shoes they bought with their own money, but only 60% remembered their first kiss.
This statistic alone led me to don my extra-hard reinforced cynical hat - the one I keep under my regular cynical hat. It has a large neon sign on it that says "It's all a load of bollocks" and is hand crafted lovingly by former Eastern Bloc conspiracy theorists and comes in a special shade of black that hasn't been invented yet.
First of all, where did they get this 60% malarkey? EVERYONE remembers their first kiss, surely? Kisses are significant. I remember my first platonic childhood kiss, my first adolescent kiss, my first 'proper' kiss (ie, one that didn't involve one or both parties being put in headlocks and threatened with noogies), my first lesbian kiss, my first beardy kiss, my first kiss with someone I had known less than five minutes, the list goes on. Who were they interviewing to get these results? Was the research conducted at the St Amnesiac's Home for Octogenarian Sufferers of Alzheimer's Disease? Presumably those who claimed they COULD recall the incident later went on to explain that their first romantic clinch was with the late Emperor Akhenaten of the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, but no further details of the relationship could be explored as Doris was at this point wheeled away for her daily dose of pills and electroshock therapy.
And what do they class as your 'own money'? It can't be pocket money, surely? I can't imagine anyone remembering the first pair of school loafers they had to fork out for after mummy had cold-heartedly and stubbournly turned round and uttered those immortal words: "You're big enough and ugly enough to buy your own bloody Sketchers from now on." Besides, the article offers up the heady surrealist image: "Whether they are a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s, Jimmy Choos, such as those worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City, or just an ordinary pair of high street shoes," as if the average spotty teenager is somehow capable of scraping together all their 50p's and fork out for a pair of Gucci slingbacks. (Oh, and a small note: Is it now publishing law that any mention of Manolo Blahnik MUST be followed by a reference to that Carrie woman? Does SJP get royalties or something?)
Perhaps they mean money you earned yourself from your first job, but if memory serves, all of your mental energies during the first two months of employment are almost entirely focussed on the utter horror of the realisation that you have to get up before noon on no less than 5 mornings in a row AGAIN, and any remaining brain cells are being devoted to trying to remember the names of everyone in the office and the location of the photocopier. If you do go shopping at any point, you will have entirely forgotten the fact that you purchased anything until one of your colleagues asks where you got your new jacket, and then you panic under the sheer monumental pressure of it all, lock yourself in the staff canteen and eat all the chocolate bourbons to make yourself feel better.
The claims are riddled with inconsistencies and vagueries, but worst of all the whole thing seems geared to once again paint a vicious picture of the female of the species as a fashion-obsessed unfeeling bitch queen, trolling about Dolcis and lovingly caressing each stiletto with a worshipful and slightly mad glint in her eye, softly purring "I like shoes more than people" before bludgeoning a shop assistant to death with a spike heel because they didn't have those green satin gladiator flip flops in her size.
It all leaves me feeling a bit alienated, as if femininity is some sort of Illuminati-esque secret order that you need a special handshake and brain-washing to join, and I just fell in through the back door while looking for the toilets. Everyone around me is chanting in Latin and sacrificing a walrus and I'm convinced that they're all about to lynch me and tie me to the altar instead. Shoes are just not something I get. I spend most of my life trudging around in the same chunky boots, trainers and converse, and any deviation from this is an unpleasant necessity brought on by my being crowbarred into a skirt for the evening. The wearing of shoes is simply a basic requirement of modern living, like all clothing, food, oxygen, and the playing of pretentious wanky adverts at the cinema before the trailers come on. PRETTY shoes are merely an UNCOMFORTABLE requirment, like vegetables, smear tests, going to the loo, and the playing of pretentious wanky yadda yadda yadda (ran out of similes there - sorry.) I wouldn't reminisce over them any more than I would reminisce over my first leg wax. (Although I am sure the experiences are not too dissimilar. Either way you are walking into a bristling hostile she-witch dominated environment and handing over large sums of money to a smiling demonic trollop who will, in return, leave you wanting to aneasthatise your lower body by banging yourself repeatedly in the knees with a meat tenderiser.)
So, in the name of research, balance of argument and having nothing better to do, I decided to scour the internet and seek out the average woman's opinion on why shoes are important. The top 3 reasons seemed to be:
1) Shoes always fit no matter how much weight you put on.
2) Shoes complete/compliment the outfit.
3) Shoes say something about the wearer.
Now, I can't comment much on the first one (my shoes never fit because I have weird feet) but I thought long and hard about points two and three, regardinging the ONLY pair of shoes I have owned that I have ever felt any affection towards - my Converse - and was horrified to find that I actually got what they were on about. Kinda.
For what was supposed to be a largely ranty entry, I had managed to argue against my own bloody point! My extra-cynical hat had been knocked off my head into the gutter and shat on by a passing seagull. Bugger.
For a decidedly non-girlie shoe, my attitude to my Little Black Sneakers has turned out to be alarmingly girlie. Even my reason for buying them was straight out of the pages of Cosmo - I saw a celebrity in them. Well ok, I saw Ed Byrne wearing a pair on 'Live at the Apollo' and thought they looked cool. And they do. If those trainers had been a pair of Christian Lou-wotsisface-with-the-red-soles sandals and Ed had been, oh I don't know, Tamara Tararka-Parmesan or some other such twig in a frock, then that would have been me handing myself over to the She-witches of the Salon for a manicure and a lobotomy.
Furthermore, they also, as point 2 clearly states, 'compliment and complete the outfit'. "The" being the operative word here. I have one 'outfit', or 'look'. Uno. Singular. Less than two. And my Converse trainers go with it. Sweet. Someone once commented to me that I have a carefully crafted look that gives the illusion of being very casually thrown together. I do, in fact, have a casually thrown together look that gives the illusion of being carefully crafted. I only have two pairs of trousers. My "£4.50 from the factory reject shop" favourite pair of man-style jeans and my second hand cast off black combats that have faded around the seams and shredded around the hems. These are teamed with a selection of printed t-shirts, mens' shirts and denim/leather jackets. From the back I look like a man. From the front I look like a man. But at least I still get IDed at 25.
And then there's the "what they say about me" thing, which sounds a bit wanky but let's run with it. Converse are the Nike trainer of the alternative crowd. They are about the only brand I will give a look in, and that's largely because I bought a pair of cheap knock-offs for £15 and they didn't last the year. Nonetheless I still wore them until the day they died, and then I continued to wear them after that until they consisted mainly of gaffa tape and glue and finally fell apart on a rainy evening in Brixton. I wore their holes with pride and considered their scuffs and cracks a fashion statement. Or an un-fashion statement, however you want to look at it. At the end of the day, Converse are worn by the Emos, the Punks, the Skaters, the Grungers, the students, the thinkers, the writers, and all the other people who tend to hang around a lot in coffee shops clinging desperately to Mac books or notepads and using long words that nobody else has heard of. That makes it sound even more wanky, but I like those people. I like to think I am one of those people, even though the Punks would probably beat me up, the Skaters would laugh at my inability to balance on a bit of wood with four furniture castors underneath, my student days came to an end some years ago, my writing remains unpublished and I used to be a Goth so am therefore legally obliged to point and laugh at Emos. And then they would beat me up too. But none of this matters because I wear black Converse and so does Ed Byrne, and I think that says something about me. So stuff you all.
Now all I have to do is convince my best friend to let me wear them to her wedding and my love affair with Chuck Taylor shall be complete.
And that word is 'shoe'.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/fashionnews/6813789/Woman-more-likely-to-remember-first-pair-of-shoes-rather-than-first-kiss.html
I read the above article today stating that 92% of women remember the first pair of shoes they bought with their own money, but only 60% remembered their first kiss.
This statistic alone led me to don my extra-hard reinforced cynical hat - the one I keep under my regular cynical hat. It has a large neon sign on it that says "It's all a load of bollocks" and is hand crafted lovingly by former Eastern Bloc conspiracy theorists and comes in a special shade of black that hasn't been invented yet.
First of all, where did they get this 60% malarkey? EVERYONE remembers their first kiss, surely? Kisses are significant. I remember my first platonic childhood kiss, my first adolescent kiss, my first 'proper' kiss (ie, one that didn't involve one or both parties being put in headlocks and threatened with noogies), my first lesbian kiss, my first beardy kiss, my first kiss with someone I had known less than five minutes, the list goes on. Who were they interviewing to get these results? Was the research conducted at the St Amnesiac's Home for Octogenarian Sufferers of Alzheimer's Disease? Presumably those who claimed they COULD recall the incident later went on to explain that their first romantic clinch was with the late Emperor Akhenaten of the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, but no further details of the relationship could be explored as Doris was at this point wheeled away for her daily dose of pills and electroshock therapy.
And what do they class as your 'own money'? It can't be pocket money, surely? I can't imagine anyone remembering the first pair of school loafers they had to fork out for after mummy had cold-heartedly and stubbournly turned round and uttered those immortal words: "You're big enough and ugly enough to buy your own bloody Sketchers from now on." Besides, the article offers up the heady surrealist image: "Whether they are a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s, Jimmy Choos, such as those worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City, or just an ordinary pair of high street shoes," as if the average spotty teenager is somehow capable of scraping together all their 50p's and fork out for a pair of Gucci slingbacks. (Oh, and a small note: Is it now publishing law that any mention of Manolo Blahnik MUST be followed by a reference to that Carrie woman? Does SJP get royalties or something?)
Perhaps they mean money you earned yourself from your first job, but if memory serves, all of your mental energies during the first two months of employment are almost entirely focussed on the utter horror of the realisation that you have to get up before noon on no less than 5 mornings in a row AGAIN, and any remaining brain cells are being devoted to trying to remember the names of everyone in the office and the location of the photocopier. If you do go shopping at any point, you will have entirely forgotten the fact that you purchased anything until one of your colleagues asks where you got your new jacket, and then you panic under the sheer monumental pressure of it all, lock yourself in the staff canteen and eat all the chocolate bourbons to make yourself feel better.
The claims are riddled with inconsistencies and vagueries, but worst of all the whole thing seems geared to once again paint a vicious picture of the female of the species as a fashion-obsessed unfeeling bitch queen, trolling about Dolcis and lovingly caressing each stiletto with a worshipful and slightly mad glint in her eye, softly purring "I like shoes more than people" before bludgeoning a shop assistant to death with a spike heel because they didn't have those green satin gladiator flip flops in her size.
It all leaves me feeling a bit alienated, as if femininity is some sort of Illuminati-esque secret order that you need a special handshake and brain-washing to join, and I just fell in through the back door while looking for the toilets. Everyone around me is chanting in Latin and sacrificing a walrus and I'm convinced that they're all about to lynch me and tie me to the altar instead. Shoes are just not something I get. I spend most of my life trudging around in the same chunky boots, trainers and converse, and any deviation from this is an unpleasant necessity brought on by my being crowbarred into a skirt for the evening. The wearing of shoes is simply a basic requirement of modern living, like all clothing, food, oxygen, and the playing of pretentious wanky adverts at the cinema before the trailers come on. PRETTY shoes are merely an UNCOMFORTABLE requirment, like vegetables, smear tests, going to the loo, and the playing of pretentious wanky yadda yadda yadda (ran out of similes there - sorry.) I wouldn't reminisce over them any more than I would reminisce over my first leg wax. (Although I am sure the experiences are not too dissimilar. Either way you are walking into a bristling hostile she-witch dominated environment and handing over large sums of money to a smiling demonic trollop who will, in return, leave you wanting to aneasthatise your lower body by banging yourself repeatedly in the knees with a meat tenderiser.)
So, in the name of research, balance of argument and having nothing better to do, I decided to scour the internet and seek out the average woman's opinion on why shoes are important. The top 3 reasons seemed to be:
1) Shoes always fit no matter how much weight you put on.
2) Shoes complete/compliment the outfit.
3) Shoes say something about the wearer.
Now, I can't comment much on the first one (my shoes never fit because I have weird feet) but I thought long and hard about points two and three, regardinging the ONLY pair of shoes I have owned that I have ever felt any affection towards - my Converse - and was horrified to find that I actually got what they were on about. Kinda.
For what was supposed to be a largely ranty entry, I had managed to argue against my own bloody point! My extra-cynical hat had been knocked off my head into the gutter and shat on by a passing seagull. Bugger.
For a decidedly non-girlie shoe, my attitude to my Little Black Sneakers has turned out to be alarmingly girlie. Even my reason for buying them was straight out of the pages of Cosmo - I saw a celebrity in them. Well ok, I saw Ed Byrne wearing a pair on 'Live at the Apollo' and thought they looked cool. And they do. If those trainers had been a pair of Christian Lou-wotsisface-with-the-red-soles sandals and Ed had been, oh I don't know, Tamara Tararka-Parmesan or some other such twig in a frock, then that would have been me handing myself over to the She-witches of the Salon for a manicure and a lobotomy.
Furthermore, they also, as point 2 clearly states, 'compliment and complete the outfit'. "The" being the operative word here. I have one 'outfit', or 'look'. Uno. Singular. Less than two. And my Converse trainers go with it. Sweet. Someone once commented to me that I have a carefully crafted look that gives the illusion of being very casually thrown together. I do, in fact, have a casually thrown together look that gives the illusion of being carefully crafted. I only have two pairs of trousers. My "£4.50 from the factory reject shop" favourite pair of man-style jeans and my second hand cast off black combats that have faded around the seams and shredded around the hems. These are teamed with a selection of printed t-shirts, mens' shirts and denim/leather jackets. From the back I look like a man. From the front I look like a man. But at least I still get IDed at 25.
And then there's the "what they say about me" thing, which sounds a bit wanky but let's run with it. Converse are the Nike trainer of the alternative crowd. They are about the only brand I will give a look in, and that's largely because I bought a pair of cheap knock-offs for £15 and they didn't last the year. Nonetheless I still wore them until the day they died, and then I continued to wear them after that until they consisted mainly of gaffa tape and glue and finally fell apart on a rainy evening in Brixton. I wore their holes with pride and considered their scuffs and cracks a fashion statement. Or an un-fashion statement, however you want to look at it. At the end of the day, Converse are worn by the Emos, the Punks, the Skaters, the Grungers, the students, the thinkers, the writers, and all the other people who tend to hang around a lot in coffee shops clinging desperately to Mac books or notepads and using long words that nobody else has heard of. That makes it sound even more wanky, but I like those people. I like to think I am one of those people, even though the Punks would probably beat me up, the Skaters would laugh at my inability to balance on a bit of wood with four furniture castors underneath, my student days came to an end some years ago, my writing remains unpublished and I used to be a Goth so am therefore legally obliged to point and laugh at Emos. And then they would beat me up too. But none of this matters because I wear black Converse and so does Ed Byrne, and I think that says something about me. So stuff you all.
Now all I have to do is convince my best friend to let me wear them to her wedding and my love affair with Chuck Taylor shall be complete.