Manolo’s Shoe Blog

Manolo says, it is Monday and you are again back at your desk, doing whatever it is you do to earn your daily crust of bread. Meanwhile, outside of your office window, the late August morning is slipping away, taking another of your summers with it.

And you ask yourself, “How did it come to this?”

The summer you turned 18 you were certain you were on your way to great things as the prima ballerina who practiced veterinary medicine on the side, or perhaps the veterinarian who danced semi-professionally.

But then your first year in college that dream crashed when you earned the “C-” in organic chemistry, and when you realized that the training you received at the hands of Madame Ivanova, (neé Melody Stumpf) was perhaps not all that.

Happily, the young are wonderfully resilient and adaptable, and you so switched majors from pre-med to English and began writing earnest and intensely-felt poetry, which you would sometimes recite in coffee houses to scattered applause.

Sadly, three years later, you had the misfortune to graduate at exactly the instant the employment market for blank verse poets collapsed, leaving you wondering what you would do to earn your way. (Your parents having inexplicably declined to support your “art”.)

Still, you were determined to succeed, and so you moved to the city and temped, sharing the grubby two-bedroom flat and meals of cheap pasta with two other girls who had impossible dreams. But, writing was diffcult in such surroundings, especially as Katie, the stout diva manquée, practiced each evening. (The first few times, her overly brassy rendition of Sì, mi chiamano Mimì was charming, the seventy-third, infuriating.)

Thus, you had to find the real job, so you could get the better and quieter class of roommates, and the next thing you know you are working the entry-level job in some field related to insurance and/or investments.

Happily, you turned out to be good at insurance and/or investments, and so you rose steadily in this giant corporation, and soon made enough to move into the tiny studio apartment in the moderately less dodgy neighborhood.

And now you are on the edge of 30, and you haven’t written poetry for nearly three years, but maybe that is not so bad, because you can now see that you weren’t particularly good at it. But you are good, very good, at this job, and it brings you satisfaction, and your bosses and subordinates like and respect you.

And, this job allows you to acquire beautiful objects that you could not otherwise have afforded, such as these gorgeous patent leather peep-toe pumps from Brian Atwood.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Shoes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.