Tax Day came and went, not with hair pulling and interminable amounts of time spent in line at the post office, for the last drop of the night, but in the shoe department of a local clothing boutique.
I went in with the intention of merely checking out the store – it’s two doors down from EB Games – but was unable to avoid the call of clogs, the flirtations of flipflops, the seduction of sneakers. Also, the huge sign that said SALE was kind of attractive.
Typically, the cutest shoes were only available in sizes large enough that two of my feet would fit in one shoe. Still, I searched through racks and piles, and found three pairs of funky thong-style flipflops, all in my size. Two pair will remain mine, the third will go to my mother, in Mexico. (I have worn them around the house tonight so that when I write “used clothing, no value” on the customs form, I will not technically be lying.)
Mine: pink stacked thongs with pink canvas across the toes, decorated with open rivets, and white thin-soled thongs with clear toe straps adorned with a rainbow ribbon across the toes, which decoration is fastened with a decorative rhinestone heart-shaped brooch. They’re cute, but the ribbons tickle a bit.
My mother’s are just like the white ones, only in turquoise, with pastel striped ribbons.
I blame my seventh-grade English (“language arts”) teacher for my love of footwear, as much as I blame my mother. The former opened the year with a lesson in how to write persuasive essays, with the example topic being that shoes are useful, in part, because they keep the worms from tickling the soles of your feet. The latter taught by example, once buying a pair of cute lacey lemon-yellow sandals, even though they didn’t quite fit, because “they were only $2.99 after all the discounts, and how could anyone refuse that?”
As a reward for allowing me to indulge in my shoe fetish without any grumbling from him, Fuzzy spent twice the amount of my three pairs of shoes on a couple of computer games. As a reward for THAT, I treated myself to a raspberry mocha frappucino.
LoL you know you may have struck a chord there with “after all the discounts how can anyone refuse that?”
More often than not we end up buying things we don’t really need because they are so cheap. It’s not a bad thing per se… it’s a different kind of satisfaction from buying one really expensive thing.
Buying something expensive that you really really want gives you an excuse to fawn over it shamelessly and show it off every chance you get. You absolutely have to balance it out with something a lot less pressuring. You don’t have to convince yourself you love a pair of 2.99 slippers, which is what I end up doing when buying something I needed to save up a bit for – I convince myself this is what I really want in case I regret it later.
Cheap slippers come and go, and their beauty is in their transience :)