mlroseplant

Luckily, all of this is irrelevant to me personally, as I am happily married and not looking to be THAT sort of attractive. However, I must've drawn the short straw in the evolutionary gene pool, as my legs are shorter than average. However, they are nicely shaped, at least.

I know many of you won't believe it, but I actually do have boots for winter use. However, I delay wearing them as long as possible.

My latest pair, BGBGirls snakeskin print mules in a sort of a silvery-nude color. They were a bit tight at first, but have broken in nicely with a minimum of discomfort. Also, they are low enough (4 1/2" with a smallish platform) to where they're not much of a challenge to walk in. I've had really good luck with BCBG shoes (the cheap lines). Hopefully, these will continue that trend.

This is one a them things I freely admit I don't understand. For me, wearing heels is all about fluidity and grace (still workin' on that myself), and this is pretty much the opposite. Let's face it, anybody could walk across a yard and trash their shoes like that. On the other hand, if a person could walk across that same yard without having their heels sink in, not get a speck of dirt on the heels, and look graceful doing it, now THAT would be impressive! But, to each his own.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, wingtips were what the old men wore to church. I have very little memory of what shoes I wore, other than tennis shoes (trainers). When I was a senior in high school, my father bought me a pair of Florsheim oxfords, very plain, to wear to the Homecoming dance on my first real date. I wore those shoes for years when the situation dictated. It is no big surprise, then, that my entry looks very similar to what I wore most of my adult life when it was time to "clean up" and look nice. They are Aldo brand, and look just exactly like men's oxfords, only with 4 1/4 inch heels. Pictured here are not the shoes I own, but they are the exact same model. They are the first stilettos I ever wore in public, and they were my only pair of stilettos for a long time. They go well with men's suits, and they look pretty decent with jeans, too.

I just got "caught" the other day. I was with a friend and colleague down at the local Dairy Queen (we took the kids), and we happened to see another union brother, walking out the door as we were waiting in line. I was wearing short shorts and 5 inch wooden open toed mules. I put the word "caught" in quotes, because I yelled this brother's name to get his attention. He turned around and came over, we all shook hands and talked briefly about where we were working, and how things were going. Nothing was said about my clothes or shoes, and no weird facial expressions were observed by me. Of course, other brothers and sisters know about me, and it may be that he was already aware of my clothing choices outside of work, and therefore was not surprised. Or, it may be that I shouldn't ever play poker with him!

I participate in a semi-monthly jam on Saturday mornings. Finally, after more than a year, the host of these events saw fit not to crop my feet clear out of all the pictures posted on social media. I noticed that! An aside that has nothing to do with shoes: Our usual lead guitarist was unable to attend this time, so that task fell to me. To tell the truth, I'm not much of a guitarist, but I did better than I had any right to do.

I am on the short side at 5' 5", or 165 cm. It has taken me years to not feel awkward about my height in heels. Even though I'm not, I feel super tall in heels. It's the one thing I don't really care for when I'm wearing heels. I guess I spent 40+ years feeling comfortable being one height, and suddenly I was 3+ inches taller. Weird, I know, but it's my true perception.

This thread has gone a bit stale, but I only noticed it just now, and it seems like there is no harm in resurrecting it. My favorite style by far is the mule (and its close cousin, the backless clog)--open toed for the summer, and closed-toed for the winter. I haven't done an inventory lately, but my approximately 60 pair shoe collection is probably comprised of 35 pairs of backless footwear, if that gives you any indication of my footwear biases. I prefer a heel height of between 4.5 and 5.5 inches, but with a platform no greater than 1 inch. The rise should ideally be at least 4 inches. In an ideal world, I like stiletto heels, and I have many pairs, but as a practical matter, I often wear thicker heels for the simple reason that they are more durable. There have been times where I have worn out stiletto heel tips in a single day, slightly thicker heels last 10 times as long. My second favorite style is the oxford, which is the shoe I wore most often when I first started heeling. If I could find a selection of oxfords with decently high heels which did not look fetishy, I would buy more oxfords. The normal-looking oxfords seem to top out at about 4 inches of heel height, and there are a ton of them at 3.5 inches and lower that are super nice looking, but are just not for me. My least favorite type of shoe? OK, my least favorite type of high heel! Birkenstocks don't count here. I would say it is the thigh-high boot. My apologies to thigh-high fans, but I have just never gotten it, why you would want boots to go over your knee, unless you were fly fishing. Ya'll know I value ankle flexibility a lot, not to mention a thing about knee flexibility! At least I am logical and consistent, thigh-high boots being pretty much the opposite of open toed mules.

Electrician here, so no heels at work for me, either. I have been working at these data centers that are popping up all over the place in this area for several years. Every contractor has its own peculiar requirements. The contractor I just left had a steel toe requirement, but had no problem with my steel toed shoes, which were perfect for the light duty type of work I was doing. My new employer doesn't require steel toes, but does require a boot that at least covers your ankle. Which is absolutely bass ackward from the way it ought to be. The work I'm doing now is inside, where it's very unlikely to turn an ankle, but we're running some fairly large conduit, which would probably leave a mark or two if you dropped a piece of it on your foot. My steel toed shoes ought to be just the ticket, but no, the rules are the rules because they are the rules.

I suspected before, but now I am quite sure my feet have shrunk a bit in the last couple of years. I have a pair of Aldo oxfords, which have in the past been my go-to shoes to wear with a men's suit, as the styling is exactly that of a conservative man's (nearly) flat cap-toe oxford, only these have 4 1/4" stiletto heels. The reason I bring this up is because many of you know that Aldo's sizing scheme was a bit "off" compared to everybody else. These oxfords are European size 40, which should be at least a 9 U.S., which is what I normally wear. These Aldo 40s are small. In fact, for the longest time, I couldn't even squeeze into them. Then I discovered that with trouser socks and a shoehorn, I could get them on. They never really pinched my feet anywhere, but they were an absolute bitch to get on, and nearly impossible without trouser socks or hosiery of some sort. Regular socks were too thick. Today, I had to go to a funeral. In fact, I had to sing at it, so it wasn't like I was in the back where no one could see me. I decided that these Aldo oxfords were just the ticket, as their styling is quite conservative. I hadn't worn them in quite a while. In fact, they had spider webs in them when I pulled them off the shelf! Like. . . old spider webs. A little polishing up, and they were good to go. And guess what? They slipped right on with a minimum of fuss, and I could feel there was a tiny bit of extra room in there that didn't exist before. I have no idea how or why, but my feet have definitely gotten smaller. Not necessarily better, but smaller for sure!

I used to have one of those! On an old lugged frame Gitane from the 60s or 70s. I agree with you whole-heartedly, except for the 100+ mile days. You may keep those! I tried to be a serious cyclist once, and I just don't love it enough.

And now, I will do some actual rumination. That is the title of this thread, after all. I have decided that I might be a freak of nature. Recently, I have been thinking about how my body reacts to being in heels for long periods of time, and have decided that, in general, it reacts pretty well. To be fair, I do not have the opportunity to wear high heels all day, every day, as my profession won't allow it, but on those occasions where I have worn heels exclusively for a week or so, I seem to come out the other end in pretty good shape, and it's only getting better as the years go by. This seems to be the opposite experience of women heel wearers I know. Even my best shoe buddy, a 43-year-old daily heel wearer, has already contemplated at what age she might have to give up wearing heels except for special occasions. Right now, she would not even consider wearing flats to work, but her work doesn't involve much standing or walking. And yet, even she didn't even consider wearing heels as her main footwear on our recent trip to Chicago (see directly above, no we did not go by ourselves), despite 25+ years of almost daily heeling experience. Whereas I, with a mere 6 years part-time experience, wore substantial heels the entire time with no deleterious effect, and I really could have done much more. How can this be? It may be that my body is simply more adaptable to physical stressors than the average. This is probably true, though I don't feel I am anything beyond the range of "normal." It may be that I'm at the upper end of the range, however. Whenever it becomes necessary to do unusually hard physical labor at work or at home, it seems I usually feel better (or at least not as bad) the following day than do many others. However, I think the secret lies in my approach to heeling compared to all but the tiniest fraction of the heel-wearing population. I have always approached heeling largely as an athletic challenge. For sure, I also like the way they look, but it's always been the women who can walk in heels as if they were the easiest thing in the world who have impressed me, and from a young age I always wondered if I could do the same thing. When I started heeling publicly, my heels were all very androgynous, and not too high. After gaining enough confidence to venture out, I put some miles on those 3 inch heels. Hundreds of miles. I developed an acid test for new shoes: If I couldn't walk two miles in them in reasonable comfort, they were gone. I got rid of some shoes I really, really liked because of this. Gradually, over 6 years, my heels have gotten higher, but my standards have not gotten lower. I reject a lot of shoes still, and it is always disappointing. Not that I haven't had pain from wearing heels, but it has pretty much been all my fault every time, especially in the beginning. I remember in particular buying my first pair of boots, and wearing them right out of the store and into a shopping mall where I had several errands to run. The brand new boots were much higher/steeper than what I was used to at the time, my errands took longer than I anticipated, and I thought I was going to DIE before I got back to the car. My feet hurt so much that I thought I had done some permanent damage. I hung my head in despair and defeat, thinking, "OK, this is why women bitch about wearing heels." Now I realize that this experience was totally due to lack of training/preparedness. An analogy would be trying to run a half marathon when the most you had ever run in your life was a 5K. Luckily, I didn't get too discouraged, and continued toward my heeling goals within a day or two. Today, that same excursion in those same boots would be entirely forgettable and ordinary (and pain free!). I have a few nieces who claim they want to be able to wear heels like me, but none have been willing to do what I have done, so unfortunately I do not have any evidence, scientific or otherwise, to back up my ideas and assertions about how it is possible to live in heels in relative comfort. I have only my own experience to go by, and only a handful seem to believe me that I actually enjoy the feeling of wearing heels, even after the second mile.

I haven't had a dog since I started wearing heels publicly, but I would wear heels to walk the dog, if I had one. What's the use of wasting a perfectly good walk by wearing flats? However, if I had to go over non-paved soft terrain, as pictured above, I would opt for wedges. I would be mortified if my shoes looked like that, ever! To be fair, I have quit mowing lawns in heels some time ago, opting for work boots instead.

I wondered this myself. I'm pretty convinced my feet have dropped half a size in the past few years.