Y'know, I've been growing increasingly suspicious of my shoes recently. Having chanced upon the phenomena of going barefoot and the alternatives thereof more than a year ago (in this New York Magazine article), my seeded hunches have since blossomed into convictions after reading Christopher McDougall's Born to Run about a month back. Add to this my life-long discomfort of sweating in my socks and you can understand why I've been hunting for these shoes high and low for quite a while now (short of actually ordering them online, which is a bit iffy when it comes to shoes).
McDougall's book, by the way, is a wonderfully written tour regarding how the human body is designed to run, and how we have always been runners, with scientific evidence weaved into a story that incoporates elite ultrarunners, together with a hidden tribe of Mexican runners, the Tarahumara. Something for everyone, even if you're not a runner.
Until I find those vibrams, I've traded in my onitsuka tigers for the straw slippers I bought when I first visited Okinawa two years ago: comfortable yet still retaining some level of taste(rubber sandals so do not go well with long pants), and from all the curious stares that I've been getting, I surmise this to be nothing short of the birth of a new trend that'll probably set the walkways on fire come, oh, next winter.(For balance, I've also been keeping a eye out for a shoes book. Really, I can't believe no one's written "The Culture of Shoe" yet.)
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