Thursday, October 16, 2003
Tuff Skins
I am bone tired. Monday night’s TKD class was relatively easy, but I ached until yesterday. Last night’s class has me wiped. The muscles around my hip sockets feel like they’ve been peeled like string cheese. The area around my shoulder blades feels like I might have once had wings and they were pulled off. I whine. I’m a big baby. It hurts to walk on my feet.
I have the nastiest feet of anyone I know. I mean like, dog paws. Run on hot gravel with my hooves, hard calloused feet. I try to keep the tops relatively inoffensive… nail polish, etc. But don’t look too close. And for your own safety, don’t touch them. They are nearly as tough on bottom as a year-old labradors.
Sometimes other women (particularly mom-women) make pedicure appointments for me. Once in a while I’ll go. I sense pity and revulsion in the heart of whoever is poised with a razor blade (among other tools and stones) and wants to file or, when desperate, cut off the offending material. I say “Leave it! I need that, these are functional feet.”
I have been working on these callouses since I was at least 17 as a lifeguard. A few years ago I did Afro-jazz, also shoeless. Lots of pivoting and dragging of the feet. Running, walking. And now TKD, with it’s requirements to do things like pivot your foot with it flat on the ground, about 70 degrees, while it holds all your weight. I look around class and all our feet are jacked, not to mention filthy.
The quiet destruction comes from shoes. I think most women can relate to this.
I come home and once my feet are clean, put on massive fuzzy pink slippers and walk around wincing. Sometimes I wear ok shoes, foot-wise, like the docs I have on today. Any shoe with the slightest heel and my arch doesn’t touch the inside of the shoe, so it’s all toes, ball, and heel. The boots with the 4” heel I had on tuesday, don’t even get me started. I have 34 pairs of shoes, after donating about 3 dozen to charity over the last year.
I love feet (in a non fetish way). I want to take pictures of all my friends with their hands touching their bare feet. Somehow feet and hands are so personal, so human and distinctive. But so are their shoes. why do i love shoes so much?
I just remembered being woken up in the wee hours by hearing someone (thing) go “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” It was likely a radiator or a pipe, but it woke me because it sounded like a voice in the living room. I like my apartment because it’s 97% sinister-vibe free.
I have a new photo album up - from “real” photos I took with my fully manual Nikon - of a Drag Race in Dupont in Fall ‘01. Soon I’ll put my other stupid long scrolling html pages into this auto-gallery thing so maybe they’ll be easier to see, and it won’t take me so long to get pix up.
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