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When you’re alone

Posted By D.E. on February 22nd, 2010

Sometimes–and only sometimes–part of me wants to pick up and move down to Florida* so that I can see my extended family and inlaws more often. I learned a couple years ago that I actually like my family. (My mother’s family.) I grew up not seeing much of them. And now that my father’s side of the family has stopped inviting me to family gatherings,** I have nothing keeping me up here.

And I like my inlaws. In fact, I’m currently penning a how-to book called How to Renovate Your House on the Cheap by Enslaving Your Elderly Parents.

On the other hand, though, that would severely curtail My Alone Time, which mostly consists of drinking bourbon, eating peanut butter out of the jar with my hands, reading Metafilter, and listening to the music that N can’t stand. And sometimes it’s music that no self-respecting musophile would admit to enjoying, under pain of death even. Like post-Gabriel Genesis. Or Josh Turner (whom NPR seems to like, so maybe he’s not totally uncool)(that was said in half-seriousness). Or the Dead.

Or post-Toys in the Attic Aerosmith. Very post-.

Twenty years ago, when I was in high school (and oh my god I can’t believe I just typed that), I got mono. I started coming down with it the week of spring break, but I didn’t want to tell my parents that I was running a fever and feeling a bit delirious and tired, because I had plans to play tennis*** with this cute boy from school and I was not about to be stopped.

So, the Monday school resumed, my mother found me standing in the shower, dry, staring numbly at the hot/cold water knobs and unable to figure out what the next step was. The doctor confirmed it and thus began my month of quarantine.

As much as I like to be alone, I can’t say that I enjoyed this month, because I also had an almost unbearable–and tenacious–case of strep throat. Seriously, it was bad. It was so bad that for the first time in my young life, food held no appeal, and I couldn’t taste anything. My parents made me milkshakes every day, which I refused. Milkshakes.

MILKSHAKES!

I lost about 15 pounds, which actually put me at a healthy weight. (When I returned to school, people would stop me and ask what happened, and I told them I’d been away at an unwed mothers home.)

The school sent a tutor every week to bring me homework assignments and give me tests and whatnot. I finished everything within an hour. Public school is a joke.

This meant that I spent most of my time watching MTV. You might not remember this, but 1990 was not a great year for popular music. As such, in my febrile state, I watched an unchanging and fairly small rotation of videos. Of them all, Nothing Compares 2 U was the most tolerable, but then there was also Adam Ant’s pathetic comeback attempt, Room at the Top. Also, we had Onion Skin, by Boom Crash Opera, a band so mind-blowingly awful and improbably popular that I have to assume they made a pact with the devil. And then, of course, there was “Hold On,” by Wilson Phillips (which, by the way, was the number one song of 1990), who had not sold their souls to the devil in exchange for fame–they were actually his henchmen and I will not be linking to their video.

Finally, though, there was a song that somehow resonated with me, as bad as it is. To this day, I really, really love it. I even bought the mp3 from Amazon last year.

Aerosmith, “What It Takes”

So when I am alone, I listen to this song. Really, it’s not so bad. A sad accordion song will do it for me every time.

*Other times, I want to pick up and move due to the fact that we do, in fact, own a house there now, and also to the fact that the weather in NYC is ready to kill me right now.
**I can’t imagine why, though I suspect I should blame Obama. I miss the Struffoli but not a lot else.
***All these odd revelations about me today! I think that was probably the last time I picked up a tennis racket, by the way. I should be glad my spleen didn’t explode.
 

Archive for February, 2006

Cruel shoes

Posted By D.E. on February 28th, 2006

You look at the woman, she is full of pain. Who is guilty? Shoes!

There’s a hilarious and fascinating article in this week’s The New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger. It’s about one man’s lifelong quest to create the best shoes ever. I wish the article were online; it’s delightful.

It turns out that I have Egyptian Feet. I always suspected that my feet were less evolved than others’, because my smaller toes weren’t longer than my big toe, the result of my ancestors’ not having worn shoes for very long. I was told this by a boyfriend in college, who–it must be said–had long, tapered second, third, and fourth toes. He declared his feet were the result of centuries of properly-clad ancestral feel. I countered that it was obvious his toes were longer because his ancestors had, up until very recently, been swinging from tree limbs and vines.

It was only at age 20 that I began wearing “grown-up” shoes. Until then, I’d been content with Converse All-Stars, Doc Martens, and (horrible, I know) Timberland all-terrain waterproof sandals. (Not because I was particularly sporty. I was just planning ahead for a punker Trail of Tears scenario.)

At age 20 I was at Macy’s returning some terrible gift and ended up saddled with a credit slip. I found myself in the shoe department looking at a pair of faux-crocodile stack-heel loafers. Something inchoate, my lizard-brain Jacqueline Susann, told me to buy them. I was dubious, seeing as they were the least-comfortable thing I’d ever worn. But Jesus appeared to me on a flaming pie in the reflection in the little foot-mirror and told me that I really needed them.

I wore them the following week to a friend’s graduation. I’d paired them with a pair of blue and white gingham capri pants and a white blouse. I ran into a contentious, heartbreaking exboyfriend who sized up my outfit and said, approvingly, “You’ve been doing your homework.”

It was about that same time that I began shaving my legs and painting my toenails with Chanel Vamp. Funny how things come into your life like that. Up until that point, the priciest things I owned were UK import records.

Over the years I managed to acquire a number of pairs of truly painful shoes. This all came to a (literally) crushing end when I broke my left foot while running, in platform sandals, to catch a train. I confessed my act of hubris to my podiatrist, who replied, “Don’t worry. When I’m finished with you, you’ll be able to wear any shoes you want.”

This was not the reply I wanted. I wanted to be told not to wear foolish footwear ever again.

I continued with my sartorial folly for another seven years until one day I broke my left foot again…and this time I was merely *walking* in heels. I went to a new podiatrist who offered appropriate amounts of opprobrium and said, “We need to fit you for orthotics.”

Is that all?

I decided that I would not consign myself to a life of wearing shoes that look like wet teabags. No more high heels for my plebeian feet, but no orthotics. You know how much orthotics cost? More than my most expensive pair of shoes. More than my most expensive UK import. For the price of a pair of orthotics, I could pay any of the bands in my record collection to come sing to me in my apartment. Almost.

So now I’m reduced to wearing shoes that seem vaguely “arty” (in a lesbian way) or sneakers that seem lesbian-y (in a lesbian way). I did buy a pair of needle-toed stilettos that I’ve worn exactly twice but that’s because they sang “Darling Nikki” to me from their perch on the clearance rack and I had to, I just had to. I’ve worn them twice. I might be able to summon the werewithal for a third outing.

I found myself reading the New Yorker article and thinking, How can I get my hands on a pair of those Stone-Age Ice Man shoes?

Posted in From the Tombs, Vanitas
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