Peg & Nancy
So I got these new shoes. That, in itself, isn't terribly big news.
It's marginally big, it's not like shoes are the sort of thing I pick up all the time. It's not like I'm Imelda Marcos or anything.
For the kids, Imelda Marcos was the wife of the President of the Phillipines, Ferdinand Marcos. Now, before this gets to be too much of a history lesson, Ferdinand wasn't a President in the sense that, say, the current President of the United States is President. Ferdinand was elected in a landslide and, at one time, showed a lot of promise. Okay, lesson over. The point is, Imelda had a lot of shoes. And that was not like me. Nor, incidentally, was I married to a Filipino dictator (as he's been described, in the later years - sorry, last history point, I promise). But that's not entirely relevant.
So I had picked up new shoes. And that was great. I didn't have stabbing pains in my legs because the soles were so worn down that they'd generated some small amount of antimatter. Point of interest: in my largely unqualified, unscientific, and as yet unpublished theories on antimatter, I believe the single biggest sticking point in releasing antimatter and antimatter-based technology to the general public is its profound ill-suited application as shoe soles. I've yet to perform any extensive research, but by the time my shoes are due for another pair, they're usually pretty amazingly painful to walk in, therefore leading me to believe that the particles in the sole of the shoes, which has been stepped on and compacted so many times as to be nearly identical to antimatter, that you wouldn't want to walk on antimatter all the time.
I got the new shoes home, took them out of the box, and threw away my antimatter shoes.
Well, they're scheduled for being thrown away. I always feel the way scientists probably feel, when they have to throw out their petri dishes full of stuff. It's heartbreaking, to see something so potentially scientifically interesting, just chucked in the trash. So they're hiding under the couch. In case we have any scientists over for lunch or anything, and the topic of conversation turns to antimatter. Or Imelda Marcos, for that matter. Not that her name, or her late husband's name, comes up in the course of conversation all that much.
The thing is, with these new shoes, they're just the slightest bit eery.
I'll notice it when I'm walking. One shoelace has come undone. Now, since I graduated from having to double-knot all my shoelaces quite a few years ago, I occasionally have the odd shoelace or so coming undone. No big deal, right?
"Happens to the best of us," you say.
I appreciate that, by the way.
But this is different.
When one would untie, the other would, moments later.
Sometimes just after I had retied the other one.
This happened the first couple of times and a few scientist friends of mine (the same ones who talked antimatter, incidentally, over lunch - for the record, they were not in an antimatter-related field) assured me there was a ready explanation for it. Because I usually tied them together it made sense that they would have similar remaining-tied properties, seeing as my shoe-tying skills were as close to exactly the same as I would ever see, unless I could simultaneously tie both shoelaces at the same time. Which I can't. Also, due to the same time in which they were tied, gravity and other physical forces had almost the exact same amount of time to work on them. "Shoelaces," one of them told me, over lunch, on my couch, sitting directly over my last pair of shoes, which I've just realised don't have any shoelaces, "tend towards high entropy. That is to say, towards more chaos. Which, for shoelaces, is the state of being untied." I've debated him on this one. Personally, if I woke up in knots and everything I would think had suddenly gotten considerably more chaotic, forget the damn shoes.
Sure, I thought, but why was it making me so uneasy? It was like mother's intuition. Only with shoes. And for guys. Like our own, special, manly mother's intuition. Regarding shoes. Women probably have too many shoes to emotionally bond with each pair.
When I found my dog missing one morning, that's when I knew why I had been feeling so uneasy.
The shoes had achieved sentience. I just knew they were going to go after the dog.
Summary
disclaimer:
That's all for this week, folks, if you would like to hear more about shoes, please trip on over to our contacts page.
If not, that's okay, don't trip over to our contact page. Or do, and tell us to stop it with the shoes already.
The thing is, you're probably a little unsure as to whether or not we're telling a story... or whether this. Really. Happened.
Anyway, regardless, we'll probably see you next week, our three billionth week in a row of producing this stuff.
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