In Your Shoes: JON

Jon's shoes are brown kind of sneaker-type shoes--the kind of fancy / cool looking kind with wide elastic zig zagging over the top of them. They also have pretty good treads that I imagine would make good foot prints. They don't seem really well worn apart from interesting wear patterns on the outer heels, which I just now noticed.

I picked them up this past Monday--Jon lent me the keys to his apartment so I could go get them. He told me that his room was a mess, but that the shoes would be easy to find, "they're in a jute bag--a potato sack--they're at the bottom of the potato sack." He was right. I really liked that they live in a potato sack.

Today I worked at home a bunch in the morning and didn't get dressed until late. I really need to do laundry...I'm wearing dresses because none of my long sleeve shirts are passing the sniff test lately. Plus dresses are fun. I noticed that I really would have liked to wear my burgundy / red boots that I would normally enjoy wearing with the clothes I had on. But I didn't. I rode to school, and made use of the treads on Jon's shoes as I discovered that cold combined with wet is a dangerous thing when it comes to bicycle brakes. As I was going up the sizable hill that is between my house and campus, I was completely preoccupied with the brake situation and a near fall I had. I heard someone shout from across the street "you can do it, aislinn!" Tara and her kids and housemate Zach were cheering me on. I walked the rest of the way to school with them, with a stop in a group of trees along the way. Finn and Maddie and Becca are excellent climbers. I stayed on the ground.

I wore Jon's shoes as I edited audio, officially changed my degree program and major, briefly met my sister (who told me that the shoes looked "clownesque," a word of her own making, I think), came home (carefully walking across the bridge where I had the mishap this morning), made dinner, and drank hot apple cider and talked about art with Earl and Patrick. We have delusions of taking over the industrial space down the road and turning it into something like the 401 Richmond building . Anyone wishing to fund this project, please please please speak up.

(Here I'm at the studio, sitting beside a paper mache Santa Claus pinata in the making. The tripod is actually holding a suspended hair dryer--the pinata was meant for an art show opening this evening, but I don't think there's a chance that it dried in time)

Earl told me that when he saw my feet he thought, "those aren't aislinn shoes." I wonder what the criteria for "aislinn shoes" are. Earl also offered to lend me a pair of his own. Yay!

It's interesting, because Jon's shoes are much too big for my feet, but they feel really comfortable to me. Again, it was a little distracting at first (though not for long), and felt somewhat comical to have my feet appear to be so much larger, and I did trip at least once. But the roominess felt good. I think it had to do with the elastic band thing that was happening--with each step, my heel lifts out of the shoes, and as I lift my entire foot off the ground, the shoe snaps back to my foot. They bend in a funny spot by my toes, and the entire effect feels a bit like I'm about to be catapulted into space every time I walk. A kind of automatic spring in my step. This seems like a good invention. So although the shoes are too big for me, no work was required to keep them on my feet, and they didn't drag on the ground.

The shoes are kind of smelly, but I only noticed this at the end of the day, so it could have been my own feet that contributed to this (though I hope not, because I don't feel good about returning smelly shoes that weren't smelly before). Oh my.

So yes, I am feeling less and less concerned about telling every person that sees me that the shoes on my feet are not my own. It is feeling more and more enjoyable and interesting and less and less of a self conscious thing to be doing, even if / when I look pretty goofy, and even when people who know me wonder why my shoes are not "aislinn shoes." It's fun. Jon's shoes are comfy to my feet, though feel unusual to wear, and are pretty practical, and yet kind of fancy in a subdued sort of way.