Yesterday Mom and Allison and I went shoe shopping. This was more me tagging along as Mom took Allison shoe shopping, because she's usually the one who spends an hour and a half debating the virtues of every shoe in the store while Mom says they're too expensive and I sit around. I was looking for tennis shoes, because I've got two pairs of clogs that I wear all the time and I can't run in them. So I looked for blue canvas high-tops, saw there were none, and commenced fishing around in the bargain aisles. And then I saw them.

The first thing you noticed about them was that they were a shocking shade of purple. They were made of that nylon satiny stuff, which was good because I don't wear leather. The heel was made of black plastic that started out normal, tapered to a half an inch in diameter, and then flared out to a round shape two and a half inches in diameter. They were fantastic. They were ridiculously impractical and yet exceedingly cool. I found them in my size and went stumbling to my sister, who was horrified.

The cool thing was that I could actually walk in them because the heel was wide at the bottom. This was nice, because usually I don't even try anything high-heeled on for fear of spraining an ankle. The highest heels I own are about an inch and a half high. But they were so nifty! And purple! I felt like the girl in Hans Christian Anderson's "The Red Shoes" where the girl is in a shop and sees this pair of red shoes that she absolutely loves. So she tricks the old woman into letting her get them and wears them to church and then is punished for her vanity by having to dance in these shoes and not being able to stop. In the end she dances into the woods and gets the executioner to chop off her feet because the shoes are magical and won't come off. It was so much like that, in part because these were obviously dancing shoes. The one place I would wear anything remotely like that would be a school dance, which would be really fun. I surprised myself by really enjoying the only dance I've ever been to last January. And these were perfect shoes.

They were only fifteen dollars, too, because they were on sale. But I knew I'd only wear them a few times and that at the end of the month I was going to give all the money I had left over to Heifer Project. And it didn't seem fair to be spending fifteen dollars on purple shoes when it could have gone toward feeding people. So I didn't get the shoes. But it was fun, those twenty minutes spent debating and pacing in front of the mirror. I tend to narrate my life. "Wracked with indecision, Julia paced the floor."

My sister scowled. "And then tripped over the ridiculous shoes she was wearing." It was funny that she disaproved, since normally she's the typical one and I'm the one asking why she needs yet another Old Navy teeshirt. This was just some strange fit of teenaged-girliness, I guess. It was fun, anyway.

March 23
March 31