Ode to Toe

So I was lying in bed last night after putting Dilly to sleep, and I was thinking. And what I was thinking about was: toes. Yes, toes. And feet. Things of which, for the first 20 or so years of my life I was largely oblivious (except for the use of them, of course)...and which, after "leaving home" and joining the American Workforce of Production & Internet Abuse, I became ultra aware due to some funny happenings. Just little stuff over the years, but it's funny how things like that will stick with you. And here's my conclusion: female America is obsessed with feet! Who doesn't look sadly at their feet after a winter of coverage & declare how they must have a pedicure immediately? And the foot jewelry...the toe rings & anklets.
The other parts of the world I have seen have not been into feet on this sort of scale. In Japan very few people ever wear open-toed shoes at all, and flip flops are worn with socks, traditionally.
My foot saga began a few months after I started working for Gary, who, incidentally I was also dating. It was summer & I was wearing these heeled flip flops all the time, thinking I was really dressing it up. Imagine my horror and surprise (in a wholly bad way) when one time I returned to work in the evening to retrieve something I had forgotton there, only to overhear 2 other women saying the following:

"So we have a pretty good team here"

"Yeah...we just have to get rid of Susanna and we'll have a perfect team. Her and her ugly toes."

Both laugh uproariously.

Me and my ugly toes? Really? I had never so much as heard tell that I had slightly unattractive toes, much less ugly ones. Sadly, this was only the beginning. My toes seem to have inspired violence of emotion one way or the other. Consider an opposite story:

While working at ADP we used to have quite a turnover of temp. workers coming through. There was this one really friendly African American guy, actually quite good looking, who was very quickly "chummy" with me. He would always greet me, and seemed just really friendly and nice. Then one day we were both getting coffee at the breakroom & he was complimenting me on something, I don't know what, and then he tacked this gem on the end:

"Yeah, you and those sexy toes of yours."

Hmmm. Sexy? Ugly? Unfortunately this was only the beginning of a very creepy sexy toe campagin that escalated until he wrote me a love letter, expressing his desire to take me out on a date, and presumably get up close and personal with said toes. Can anyone say YUCK? So I dated him for 3 months. Ha. Kidding. He had a visit with HR soon after.

And this is just the personal stuff. There were always at least 3 or 4 women at ADP, every time the weather warmed up, who would start in with comments expressing distaste at seeing un-pedicured feet uncovered, and would make general comments about how gross it was....along the lines of, "If you have ugly feet, cover that **** up". This was all new territory for me. I started getting pedicures and really liked the result.
But you know, pedicures cost a lot of money over the long term, if you keep them up. And when you've had a professional pedicure, trying to do one for yourself just doesn't seem to cut it anymore. There's really no comparison in my opinion. So I tend to spend the summer longing for them and getting them like maybe twice, if I'm lucky.
All this has made me so aware of feet. If you have nasty toes, I will notice. I will be in agony if my heels are all cracked and gross and you come over to see us at our place and I don't have shoes on. It's sad.
Incidentally, I told Jeff about the "ugly toe" incident, and he has jumped right on the bandwagon, like the supportive husband he is. He routinely takes my foot and says,
"If someone was mountain climbing on your toes, they would go right down from your big toes, like steps (here he takes his fingers and walks them down my toes until he comes to the 2nd to last one. The piggy that had none. Then:)
"And then they come to the last toe, and....AHHHHHHHH they fall off the cliff and die if they don't have a parachute. HA HA HA HA."
He says I have a mutant baby toe because it's about 1/2 the height of the other ones. He also says my toes are as long as fingers.
And I come right back and tell him that his big toe that got crushed by Noah about 2 years ago and the nail never grew back right is rancid. And his toes are overweight and need to go on a diet. Then we both laugh together. Good times.

As a last thought, I think my sons' toes are the cutest things on the face of the earth. I just can't get enough of them, and 'eat' them regularly. The ADP toe guy would be proud.