Robert Manners

Red Shoe Diary

(v. 2 - proofread and commented upon several hours later)

I'm wearing red shoes right now, along with blue jeans and a celadon/charcoal/periwinkle/white horizontal-striped thermal pullover, as well as the usual assortment of boxer-briefs and crew socks. I am going to have to put on a different shirt or something to tie into the shoes... can't just wear red shoes with any old thing. Or can you? (In point of fact, I remembered that the fleece scarf I bought at the Gap the other day is quite red and, with my new brown fleece jacket, pulled the whole outfit together).



I spent most of high-school wearing red shoes. In sophomore year, I had red jazz oxfords, in junior year, I had red Topsiders, and in senior year, I had red Vans (as well as the topsiders, the jazz oxfords, and a few other pairs of non-red shoes that I don't really remember - and why should I? - my feet reached their current size and stopped growing when I was fifteen). I also had a red book-bag, or rather a succession of red gym-bags in which I toted my books, which tied the shoes into whatever else I was wearing. I seem to remember that I usually wore tight jeans or pale neutral baggy double-pleated twill pants, a vintage blazer (grey or green tweed or blue or grey serge) with the cuffs rolled halfway up my forearm, a bright-color or pale-striped dress-shirt or polo-shirt with the collar turned up, and a vintage tie knotted an inch or so below the clavicle. By senior year I had added several brooches and amusingly witty buttons to the lapels of the jackets, and a multiplicity of jellie-bracelets to each wrist. My hair was similar to how it is now, except that there was a good deal more of it, it was thicker and all one color, and it evolved into an asymmetrical bob by the time I graduated (if I had my scanner here at home, I'd show you my Senior Portrait... it's a caution).



It was the 80s. I was young. Jon Cryer as "Duckie" in Pretty in Pink gave me a total boner. In retrospect, though I was wildly outré for the urban middle-class environment I occupied, I think I did a pretty good job of dressing myself on a tight budget.



Anyway, I have no idea why red shoes give one such a lift... and further, I don't know why I waited so long (seventeen years) to get another pair of red shoes. But I did get them, on impulse when I was shopping for something else, at the Bass Outlet in the Great Mall (it's really big, but not so great) in Milpitas. And then I didn't wear them until Christmas day, since Bass shoes have to be broken in and I wasn't sure I wanted to wear them at all. But now I am wearing them every day, and I might just wear them until they fall apart like the jazz-oxfords and the Topsiders did, way back when. I'll put on my red shoes and dance the blues with my little China doll, dancing in the street because it's modern love (Bowie was my other big crush in the 80s, along with Nick Rhodes).



Well, back to reality, I have to run and take the Grandmother down to San Jose and visit with cousins and whatnots. She's spending the night and can't quite get herself pulled together just now, so I have to help her pack her overnighter. She's doing fairly well, by the way... finding more bruises from where she fell, but they don't hurt, and though she has a black eye that would make a boxer proud, and her knees and elbows still ache a little, she feels pretty much usual. (I was joking to my cousin that now I'll never get Grandmother on a diet... she realized today just how much of her fall was muffled by her fat when she found a number of bruises on her more pronounced physical features. The way she fell, her knees took the most impact, and by the time her head reached the bathtub there was very little force in her momentum. The cut on her head was not from the tub, it was from her glasses, which were pushed into her face when she covered them with her hands. But any way you look at it, if it weren't for her extra avoirdupois, she could have broken a hip, some ribs, or every bone in her body when she fell. So God bless fried foods.)



So I have to dash, and won't be able to do my usual compulsive editing until later tonight... please forgive my typos and errors (though rereading I discover very few typos at all, and only one or two syntactical errors... maybe I should write in a big-ass hurry more often). Look at this instead (and by the way, read about the later part of my evening at other people's sites... I got to meet Jhames, Aaron, and Robbie when we convened at Max's Opera Cafe with Min Jung, Ernie, Michael, and Vince; it's always interesting to meet someone who you know rather intimately from their journals but have never spoken to or seen in person... people are often so unexpected, their spoken voices so different from their written voices, the details of hands and feet and napes just not what you were expecting from random webcam shots; I'm going to have to make more of a point of meeting other bloggers in person! It's fun!) :