LaughAtlantis

I have a secret fear of escalators.
Of course, now I've revealed it, so it's not so secret, eh?

There are five escalators between the T and my work. Now, I could walk up all the flights of stairs associated with them but my right ankle and both my knees are somewhat shot right now (I'm in physical therapy; I fell off a bus; long story...) so I have resigned myself to taking at least a few of these escalators each day. So the fear holds me.

My problems with escalators are manifold. An escalator should simply be a flight of stairs that moves up, right? So why is there always a list of like ten things you shouldn't do posted at each end of the escalator? You don't have these sort of warnings for stairs! Hold onto the edge, hold onto your child, don't touch the side of the escalator with your feet, don't take strollers with you, be careful with your belongings, be careful getting on, be careful getting off... seriously, is it any wonder that these things scare the bejesus out of me?

The getting on part of the process is okay for the most part. But the getting off parts confound me. Getting on from the bottom, you just look for when a stair comes out and then you step on it. That's okay. But getting off at the top, you can do one of two things. You can either wait until you get to the tippety top, when your fieet are practically touching the drop-off, and then step. This is scary because if you happen to miss the drop-off, you can trip or stumble getting off and you look like an ass. Alternatively you can wait till you are about a half step up from the top and push off from there. Then you run the risk of tripping or getting stuck and slipping backwards. That's frightening. Getting on at the top - again, look for the stair to form and then step on. But at the bottom, what do you do?? You have to gauge just the right place to step off from, which is sometimes a challenge. Again, very easy to trip.

And then you have the riding options. Do you stand and wait for the escalator to actually raise or lower you, or do you walk along with it? I'm sort of okay with walking up it, but the walking down part... holy crap, that's scary. If you fell, you would tumble forward onto a mass of metal that would continue down until your head was hitting a point where the metal was just being sucked into the floor while more pseudo-stairs were smacking you in the head. Not to mention, you could possibly take people out who were in front of you. Bang into someone else and create a four-person escalator pile-up. And the people behind you would have to jump over the pigpile in order to get off where they could hopefully whip out their cell phones and dial 911.

To top it all off, being on an escalator puts you at the mercy of the other people on it as well. If you stand, there may be people behind you who want to run up it and get pissy because you have no intention of doing so. There comes the inevitable sighing in those cases. But my favorite people to deal with are the ones who get off the escalator and stand there looking around to see where they are. I just want to yell at them,"You've just gotten off a damned escalator, you mental midgets! Anyone behind you is going to smack right into you! MOVE!!!" But that would probably be rude, eh?

Escalators. The most frightening things in the world - with the exception, perhaps, of giant man-eating sabre-tooth tigers back from the dead and sitting at my front door. But other than that... escalators.

We've got an inch or so of water in our basement right now - not everywhere in our basement, just in the lower areas where the foundation has settled. Not enough to install the sump pump or use buckets. Just enough so that I can wander around around with our brand-spanking new Wet-Dry Vac, singing 'Getting to Know You' to the vacuum while in reality, I can't get the song 'Flood" out of my mind.

... I'm re-designing the blog. Cross your fingers.

I've been conducting an informal survey among the women that I know, asking the simple question, "What's the most you've ever paid for a pair of shoes?" I was somewhat appalled by the answers.

The reason I started this little quest to find shoe answers is that I read a lot of chick lit. Inevitably, there always seems to be something in there about shoes - particularly about shoe shopping. I don't understand women's obsession with shoes. Shoes are just straps of leather and canvas and rubber that prevent your feet from hitting the ground. What's so fabulous about that?

In my eyes, the most important parts of shoes are comfort and function. Super high stiletto heels scare the crap out of me and shoes with no back are bizarre. The combination of those two elements makes me cringe. Why wear shoes that cause you an incredible amount of pain, or point your toes in ways that are clearly unnatural, or produce that nasty squidgy sound when your sweaty foot hits flip-floppy moist leather. Blech. I just don't get it.

So I asked around. I think I asked about twenty women. The answers that I got blew me away. $200 was the average . The average - meaning a number of people had much higher numbers than that. One woman that I work with cited "$400 - but they were on sale, so they would have been $550 normally. I got a real bargain there." I'm sorry, but four hundred dollars for a pair of shoes is not a bargain. Go to Payless. A bargain there is $7.99. Granted, they're crap, but they'll last you a couple months. Or try DSW, where you can get some really nice shoes for far less than a hundred dollars.

I looked around online to find some really freakin' expensive shoes. I found a pair of Louis Vuitton mules that were $1080. Who in their right mind pays over a thousand dollars for buckles, leather, and a piece of cork??

The most money I have ever spent on a pair of shoes was ninety dollars. I was in high school at the time and that was a huge amount of money for me, but they were Doc Martens that I wore pretty much every day for the next six years. I loved those shoes. I wish I still had them, but I wore those things into the ground. SInce then, the most I've paid for a pair of shoes was $55 - a pair of work shoes that I wore often enough to (probably) get my full money's worth out of them.

But $1000? Even if I won the lottery, I wouldn't pay that kind of money for shoes. Hell, if I won the lottery, I'd quit my job and go to cobbling school, become a shoemaker, and charge people astounding sums for my wares.

It seems like some women would actually pay for them.