Shoe Lovin'

Ha! My lovefest for all that is shoe got me found on Blogger, by someone in Leicester, England, no less. I knew I wasn't the only shoe-nut out there. He too is an aspiring shoe designer and you can find his blog, louboutininthemaking, with the link below. Long live the heel!

Don't Step On My Blue Suede Shoes

Anyone who knows me knows I loooove shoes. Really. I would marry them if I could.

One of my life’s dreams is to design my own shoe line. But it’s not quite as easy as starting your own clothing line. Mocking up a pair of strappy heels that won’t buckle under 130 pounds of flesh, or come flying off and stab some unsuspecting passer-by in the eye – because you know that would happen – isn’t as simple as mocking up a pair of pants. I’ve seen handmade shoes on Etsy and they’re nothing I would ever wear, so if anyone knows how one would go about starting their own shoe line…with no design education…and no money, let me know.

Back in the early 2000s I found the perfect pair of shoes. Topshop blue suede, strappy heels with a 40s vibe. They were comfortable to walk in and looked as good dressed up as with a pair of jeans. Elvis was right. You can do anything but don’t step on my blue suede shoes. I wore those shoes to death. I wore them in sun and rain, uphill and down dale. I wore them right up until my friends performed an intervention and told me I could wear them no more. They were a faded dirty blue, and the straps that were once able to contain my chubby toes were now losing the battle. Creeping toes aren’t pretty but still I needed to be told to retire them to shoe heaven.

I was stubborn. “Fine,” I thought “I won’t wear them any longer but I refuse to throw them away. I’m going to keep them and have a pair commissioned when I am fabulously wealthy” (still waiting on that by the way). They sat like an old plum at the top of my wardrobe, misshapen and dried out, for about four years. My mum, who owned a pair also that was far less worn out, offered me hers but alas her feet are much smaller than mine.

Skip to present day and I am on eBay, again, desperately hunting for ‘blue suede shoes,’ again. Out of nowhere I had the bright idea to search ‘Topshop’ (no, I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that before, either) and *insert sparkly heaven noise here* there they were. One pair of blue suede shoes deceptively described by the owner as teal colored, in pristine condition, in my size (well almost; they’re a little big but that never stopped Mary Kate and Ashley). Thank you shoe gods. They were listed at $15 and I was the only bidder for the whole week. But the shoes gods weren’t going to reward me so easily. I had to prove I really wanted them. About 10 minutes before the end some minion started bidding furiously against me. I tell you this only because it was a lesson to me in my eBay psychology. I lost all reason. I was not going to let those shoes get away no matter the cost. I was just throwing dollars at them to make sure that I wasn’t outbid seconds before the end. I won the shoes, in fact I’m wearing them now, but I scared myself. Thankfully I wasn’t bidding on anything more expensive because in the heat of the moment I probably would have sold my Grandma just to hold onto what I believed to be rightfully mine.

If you don’t love shoes this story will sound insane, or at least my enthusiasm for telling it will, but if you do love shoes you will know that this is a story with a very happy ending. And who knows, maybe in another ten years when my chubby toes have broken free of this pair, I will chance upon another pair of blue suede shoes, and the dried up carcasses of the previous ones can be my own creepy little legacy.

Oh the Irony

I just wrote a really long blog, the subject of which was administrative calamities, and Blogger lost it. Well played Blogger, well played.

A Tiny Little Knot with Evil Intentions

I'm the one of the youngest out of my school year group so I've always had ample time to get used to the idea of my next birthday swinging around. My friend Vicki and I bookended the rest of our friends so long before I turned sixteen or twenty-one or whatever milestone it was, I would have already celebrated that number a dozen or so times. This is even more true now that I'm 'friends' with a ton of people from my high school who I was never actually friends with in the first place. 

For all of us this year is that of the big 3-0 and my friends have been turning thirty since the beginning of last September. I have had months to prepare for those looming two digits of my own, that add up to so little and yet so much, and up until about two weeks ago I was completely at ease with it. "I'm actually looking forward to turning thirty" I would boast, giving myself props for being so cool. Then I saw a Facebook posting from a high school classmate stating, with a sad face emoticon, that she had just 29 days of being 29 left. I found that kind of clever and decided that I would make a note of the first of the last 29 days of my 29th year, only to discover that I was older than the girl in question by exactly a week, and that I was in fact already within the last three weeks of my 29th year. Oh the humanity. My smugness dissipated in a flash, replaced with the tiniest knot of fear nestling itself just above my belly button.

I am now approaching the last week of my twenties and I'm doing a pretty good job of smothering the voice of that little knot by alternately earnestly ignoring it, and drowning it out with wine. It's a sneaky little bastard though because it doesn't just come out and say "hey loser, what have you got to show for your thirty years?" It poses such barbed little questions as,

"Hmm...is this where you imagined you would be by the time you're thirty? What? I'm just asking."
"Didn't you imagine that you might be married with children by now? You know, like most of your high school friends are - aww don't they look happy?"
"So...you're going to be a thirty year old administrative assistant, have I got that right?"
"I don't know about you, but I always expected that you'd be a successful lawyer or something by now. I suppose it's OK though."

I've never even wanted to be a lawyer but that title is a clear marker on the barometer of how successful you are, right? Lawyer would be at about 85°F with thirty-year-old Administrative Assistant hovering around the twenty-five degree mark. Damn, where's that bottle of wine? I did think about not anesthetizing myself with a bottle of Shiraz and instead trying to do some of those ‘things to do before you’re thirty.’ That was until my Googling for such activities turned up this list. If aspiring to this level of moronity is how one is supposed to spend the last few days of their twenties I would rather stick with the WineV and just wake up in my next decade. See you in nine days. *Glug*

From Blinman.com
1. Have a really stupid accident which necessitates a hospital visit
2. Shoot something
3. Take a weekend break more than 1000 miles from home
4. Boot Linux on your home PC
5. Get lost in a country where you don't speak the language
6. Spend more than your monthly income on a pocket sized gadget
7. Post bail for a friend
8. Break a really large plate glass window
9. Make a parachute jump on a hangover
10. Use a whole roll of gaffa tape in one day
11. Make a pointless modification to your house
12. Neck a pint of peppermint oil
13. Pull a shemale by mistake (but realise in time...)
14. Buy a samurai sword
15. Delay paying a bill until the summons arrives
16. Destroy a speed camera
17. Refill an inkjet cartridge
18. Say something obscene on national television
19. Do a J turn in order to beat somebody to a parking space
20. Break a sledgehammer
21. Make a bomb
22. Smash a CRT
23. Require medical treatment as a consequence of kinky sex gone wrong (STDs don't count.)
24. Tip a waiter with something other than money
25. Light a fire with petrol
26. Kidnap someone
27. Park inside a motorway service station
28. Own a convertible.
29. Live abroad.
30. Drive at more than 140mph.
31. Get something for free through a masterpiece of complaining
32. Give yourself a mains electric shock.
33. Completely dismantle an object larger than yourself
34. Write off a car
35. Fall asleep and get really hilarious sunburn
36. Get drunk on Absinthe
37. Stay up all night listening to a girl have an emotional crisis
38. Lick the terminals of a 9 volt battery
39. Take part in motorsport
40. Stay at the office for more than 24 hours
41. Set off a fire extinguisher
42. Drive at least 600 miles in a day on two lane roads
43. Hotwire a car
44. Watch all the Monty Python films In one sitting
45. Shag an ex-girlfriend by mistake
46. Dial 999
47. Commit a faux pas which means that a friend will never speak to you again
48. Make a bet you couldn't afford to lose
49. Read a 500 page book in one sitting
50. Escape a perfectly justified parking ticket.

Neigh, I Don't Want Those Slutty Shoes.

My day job demands, well, not much really, thus I spend far too much time on the Internet. That could be time well spent reading the New York Times, writing, furthering my career etc. etc. But alas, despite my best intentions, I inevitably end up “window” shopping. This is, however, a vast improvement on my past predilection for actual shopping. I’ve been asked why I torment myself by looking at stuff that I can’t afford to buy (stupid frugality kick), and I can’t honestly say why – maybe I like that feeling of longing, yearning. Without them a boring job is even more so.

One of my favorite online stores to browse is Modcloth. I don’t know what it is about their logo, layout or aesthetic but it just really appeals to me, and generally the things they sell, especially the shoes, are cute and pretty reasonably priced. Sometimes though they’re so far off the mark, you wonder if you’re still in same store.

A case in point - this pair of shoes which they named “A Night’s Tale Heel” (more about that later). Usually their stuff is understated, cool, mod even, but these are just trah'shy. If I saw a woman wearing these I would run a mile in the other direction lest she think I was encroaching on her turf. A sky-high heel, chain link, and velvet? Please, they could star in their own porno. The best thing is that on the website they recommend you pair them with your “medieval-inspired accessories.” Damn, my helmet and greaves are still at the Blacksmith’s being polished.


Their other fail from today is this monstrosity. It’s redonkulous. Literally. It’s a purse, shaped like a donkey. I suppose it might be a horse but let’s be honest, a purse by any other name would look as daft. It’s apparently made out of ‘dark and stormy canvas,’ which doesn’t surprise me - I’d be feeling pretty dark and stormy if I’d been used to make this, and the kicker here is that they’re asking a lofty $112.99, erm, they can go jump.

Like I said, I do generally like what they sell, and given how much Modcloth have made from me, I can give my two cents on a couple of items. What has always irked me, however, is the names they bestow upon their products. For whatever reason they can’t just call it a crocheted vest, they must call it “As the Crochet Flies Vest.” All I hear is the third syllable of that sentence. “A Night’s Tale Heel” is no better – just adding to the ‘streetwalker’ vibe, people. And can they just call this a horse-purse? No, they must call it a ‘Misty of Chic-oteague Purse.’ What?? I know that this is probably some über clever reference to a famous horse which is completely lost on those of us not equine inclined, but you know what? I don’t care. It doesn’t make me want to go and find out what horse they’re talking about, and it definitely doesn’t make me want to buy the purse, besides which it doesn’t even look like a horse, it looks like a donkey.

A First

Completely plagiarising my friend and business partner Karen, I'm going to write about a 'first' for me. See her blog 'So What's New?'

Yesterday I was a hair model - the good kind. I didn't have some shear wielding student attack my hair like a possessed lawnmower, I had my regular stylist, who I heart by the way, use me for a presentation. A few of the stylists from my salon, Grasshopper, had travelled to the Toni & Guy Academy in New York to learn new styles, techniques, and theory (yes, there are theories in haircutting) meaning that us three lucky gals, two haircut models and one color model got their hair did for free!

So why, out of all her clients, did my stylist ask me to model? Simple - I pretty much let her do whatever she wants to my hair and I'm not one of those people who freaks out if it's not exactly what I envisioned. Don't get me wrong, I once was that girl, when I was 15 and the local village hairdresser decided that to take some of the volume out of my wavy, fine, frizzy hair she would simply chop it all off to about 2 inches long around my head a la Mrs. Doubtfire. That time I did freak out and walked home with my arms wrapped around my head, crying like a banshee. That was my first and worst foray into so called professional hairstyling and since then I've never had a bad experience, but like I said, unless they literally made all of my hair fall out of my head, I wouldn't freak. It's just hair, it'll grow back.

The weird thing about being a hair model was that rather than sitting in front of a mirror and reading a magazine, we were seated facing about twelve other stylists from the salon with nothing to read. I concentrated on a lot of shoes, wall decorations and anything else that would prevent me from making eye contact with the same person over and over - you know how that happens.

You also get to hear hair stylist speak. They talk to each other using the industry lingo rather than speaking in layman's terms for the clients. I had no idea what they were talking about, it could have been a discussion on the advancements in neuroscience for all that I understood. Words like halo, disconnection, diagonals, inverted radials etc. etc.

The whole experience was pretty great. A completely free, hot off the press haircut from a stylist I trust - she really sounded like she knew what she was talking about - who was giving me the level of attention that naturally comes when someone is being watched by their boss and colleagues.

Rebecca the Wrake

Once again I have to begin a blog posting with "look how long it's been since my last post." Rubbish. I claim to be a writer. A writer is someone who writes. Therefore until I can respectably blog at least once a week, I am going to refer to myself as a Writabe as in a "wannabe writer." Hmmm, that has a ring of busy-bee-ness to it which doesn't really apply to me. Obviously. 

How about a Writender, as in a 'pretender.' But really 'pretender' makes me think of "pretender to the throne" - someone who makes a claim to an abolished throne or one currently occupied by someone else. While there could be an element of lying here - someone making a claim to something to which they have no right, much like me 'lying' (ouch) about being a writer - this term does imply some level of motivation and ambition, which also don't really apply to me. Obviously. 

So, what else? I know. A Wrake as in 'fake.' And because a 'rake' is a name for a dissolute person - one lacking in restraint, which as many of my friends can attest, is unfortunately rather fitting - that is what I shall label myself.

So this is me, Rebecca the Wrake (has a nice alliteration to it, don't you think?)  signing off with the hope of, sometime soon, once again referring to myself as a Writer.