And now, my shoes

Going on interviews involves a lot of walking and, as a woman forced to wear "professional" attire (not sweats and sneakers), I need to do the walking while wearing uncomfortable shoes. Heels, even. God help me. The suit I found on sale at Burlington Coat Factory is quite long. I've decided it means the manufacturers just expected that any woman buying the suit soon would wear heels. First, I wondered if the retail world doesn't just think that a woman my height should be quite so big, but I'm like 5'10 so how much taller did they expect me to be?

Although, it's entirely possible that Calvin Klein would find me fat. I hear he finds everyone fat.

Anyway, I had two options: go to the tailor and get the pants shortened, or buy heels. I don't know what came over me, but I decided that if Calvin Klein thought the suit needed them, then I should try to find comfortable heels. My friends and the internet assured me that such things exist. I think they're delusional. They all say I just need to "get used to it", but when is pain a sign that I need to get used to something? Regardless, I recognize I know nothing of fashion, so I listened to those who sounded like they knew what they were talking about.

My rotation shoes, from some store in NYC whose name I don't remember

These are the shoes I wore on my clinical rotations whenever I wasn't allowed to wear sneakers. Once I broke them in, I would even wear them with scrubs.

I love them. One of my friends calls them "hideous" (hi, Stephanie!), but I feel nothing but devotion for them. They're black, which means I can get away with wearing them with "business casual" pants, even if they're "ugly".

But they're not ugly. They're gorgeous. I have wide feet and these things genuinely accommodate that. Sometimes shoes claim to be "wide", but I still feel like I'm being strangled when I put them all. Best of all, it was actually possible to break these in. Yes, I got a little vesicle the first time I wore them, but the third time I could have put them on without socks.

I would've wore them to interviews with my suit, but I broke the soles at some point this year. Hey, they were fifty bucks (cheap, for NYC prices), and I wore them almost every day for a year. So I had to look through my closet or buy interview shoes.

By "look through my closet", I meant consider the other pair of shoes I own:

My old boots, bought by mother when I was a teen

The creases at the front give the impression that I've worn these bastards often. The creases are liars. I can count the number of times I worn these things with one hand.

When I was a teen and mom cajoled me into it. Once while I was in undergrad, shadowing a gastroenterologist. And for five seconds around my house while trying to decide if I could use them for my interviews.

When I show these to girlfriends complaining about what torture they are, they look at me like I've lost my mind. Or like they never before realized what a baby I am. They say these torture devices look "comfortable" because the heel is wide. But they. Are. Not. I put these things on, take twenty steps, and my lower limbs paralyze until I take them off. It's like my feet remember what happened when I wore them to that party as a teen, and now they have PTSD.

And I can't blame them. Here's a diagram of the bones of the foot. Normally, the calcaneus (heel) bone takes most weight when a human being stands. Heels force a person to push much more weight onto the metatarsal bones, which are not supposed to be bearing so much weight, except during dorsiflexion. And the heels actually make them bare even more weight during dorsiflexion. Blah, blah, blah . . . heels force feet into an unnatural position.

The worst part is, these things were expensive. My mother paid around $70 for them, and this is like ten years ago, when $70 was real money. (I realize, after typing that, how it sounds. Of course, $70 is still money today, but it was more ten years ago. So I'm just going to leave the comment as is and embrace how out-of-touch it is).

Where was I? Right, I needed to buy shoes, as cheaply as possible. I enlisted another friend (hi, Leanne) and took her to a nearby Payless, where I purchased these:

Newest boots

Left to my own devices, I would've bought the exact same type of shoe as above (not the evil boots, my beloved hideous chancletas). But I wanted to put my best foot forward and both Leanne and the internet assured me that these were wedge heels, and thus more comfortable.

It makes sense, kind of. The wedge design (while uglier, apparently) does distribute the weight across a higher sole surface area. Though I was skeptical since these heels would also contort my feet into an unnatural resting position that would put too much weight on my metatarsals.

They kind of worked at first. The weight distribution did make it easier for me to actually walk on them. I got a bulla on the medial aspect of my right foot, right beneath my big toe, but it wasn't anything serious. That just happens with new shoes that don't have the good sense to be sneakers, even to guys, or so I hear. I wasn't in significant pain, so I decided to wear ACE bandages under my socks until I broke them in. For a while, everything was working out well.

And then I started interviewing in NYC hospitals. These things were not designed for the kind of walking necessary to get around in NYC, where traffic is so bad that a combination of walking and public transportation is much faster than driving. Just two days traipsing about lower Manhattan and my poor feet are destroyed.

I've learned my lesson. Tomorrow, I'm going to Payless and buying the ugliest, clunkiest, widest flats I can find. Calvin Klein's suit will just have to deal.