Feet of torture
Sometimes, you come across a seemingly minor annoyance that proves so strong, you decide to dedicate your entire opinion column to complaining about it. Last month, I came across such an annoyance.
I recently went to a wedding for a close friend. As far as weddings go, it seemed to go off without a hitch. My fellow groomsmen and I largely spent our time in a room, tucked away from the rest of wedding and occasionally helping set up displays and such. But when it was time to don our tuxedos, the event took a turn.
Here’s the thing: we’ve walked on the moon. We’ve developed bombs that can level entire cities, we’ve invented vehicles that fly through the air and we’ve charted every inch of land on this Earth. But it was only until recently that we started making comfortable dress shoes.
The place I got my tuxedo decided to use a type of dress shoe made out of a material akin to well-cured leather. I put on my tuxedo at about 3 p.m. the day of the wedding. By 3:01 p.m., my feet were screaming.
The fun thing about having shoes that actively hurt your feet during a wedding is that it makes you notice other things. For example: the lead-up to weddings, or at least this one, involve a lot of walking. Walking out to the courtyard to get pictures. Walking back to the room where they kept us. Walking out to a set of stairs to get more photos. Walking up and down those stairs to change positions and walking back.
The pictures themselves involved the photographer having us kneel, which made the roof of the shoes come down on my toes like a blunt razor. When I took my shoes off at the end of the night, I was surprised to find my feet weren’t, in fact, bloody.
But here’s the fun part: these shoes somehow managed to put in the overtime to make feet hurt when standing still. As we were all standing at the head of the ceremony, my feet felt as if they were being cooked.
You see, I’ve found over the years that some men’s dress shoes have what I believe to be miniature heaters in the soles that, inexplicably, also vibrate ever so slightly. And they activate if they sense you’ve been standing still for longer than about 30 seconds.
It was a morbid callback to my childhood, when my parents would drag me to fancy events. Inevitably, they’d stick a pair of dress shoes on me and tell me I “just needed to break them in.” Well, those shoes always hurt as much as the last time wearing them as the first. I began to think “breaking in” shoes was a lie parents told their kids, like how eating and swimming would cause cramps, or anyone could be president of the United States.
The tuxedo was nice, it’s just a shame I had to wear a pair of iron maidens on my feet.
-Will Channell is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.