lust for shoes

I don't fall prey to wanting something someone else has very often, but on Wednesday it hit me like a freight train. I was at a very boring meeting of one of the many committtees associated with my running group, and a friend I haven't seen in a while walked in. She has outstanding fashion sense, and as always I admired the elan with which she had put together a great-looking outfit from a variety of things that I probably wouldn't expect to go together.

Then, I looked at her shoes, and that covetous feeling hit me.

I wanted those shoes.

They were deep burgundy in color, with a high heel and a strap across the top, and I wanted them so badly I could almost taste it.

Whenever I have really strong feelings about something, I try to take a step back to see if I can figure out where those feelings come from and why they're so powerful. To that end, later that night I thought about why I wanted someone else's shoes so much. I came up with a few navel-gazing reasons:

They're pretty. Duh. That's an easy one.

I haven't bought clothes of any kind in a while. This is the result of a challenge I set for myself: I'm not much of a clothes horse anyway, but I decided last year that I'd try to make it through all of 2007 without buying any new clothes. I have to make an exception for pajamas since all of mine ripped, but so far it's mid-May and I've stuck to the plan. It's been really eye-opening in terms of learning to make do with what I have but I'm getting a little tired of what I have and some things are genuinely starting to wear out, work shoes in particular. In other words, temptation is developing.

I like them on my friend. My friend is really beautiful, and I think there's an element of maybe it'll rub off on me at play.

They're different. My shoes are like Henry Ford's color scheme for cars: Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black There is almost no thought required for black shoes, so that's all I've worn for years. Burgundy is different in kind of a nice way.

I'm prone to shoe fixations anyway. Runners' feet are nothing to shout about and in fact, it's usually best to keep them covered, but my feet are small (size 6) and I've never met a woman's shoe that didn't work well with small feet. Price notwithstanding, I find shoe-shopping easy and angst-free, unlike shopping for pretty much any other kind of attire.

The funny thing is, as soon as I went through this exercise of figuring out why I wanted the shoes. . . well, I didn't want them anymore.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's no substitute for critical thinking.