boots not made for walking

(old email from 4.01.03)

From the author of "the cat ate my banana bread" comes "something is going horribly wrong with my boot."

I'm wearing these brown boots, right? Giant chunky heel, good 3 inches. Makes me look 5'10". So all day, as I walk up and down the halls, I hear this weird clunk, and I figure it's just one of those strange phenomena in which the crease of my jeans is hitting the heel of the boot and making a funny sound. It happens sometimes, like the swish-swish of corduroys.

So just now, I parted from James' cube and on my way back to my desk--maybe a total of 20 steps--I get this repeat popping noise in my left boot. It's not the usual ankle-cracking sound I usually hear. (Or, as Anne Marie would say, the ankle-cricking sound.) Bewildered and perplexed, I keep stopping in the hall to confirm my hearing, finding only that when I stop walking, the noise also ceases. So I take a few more strides and round the corner, promptly parking in a chair and ripping the boot off my foot. I turn it upside-down and shake it, and there's a clear rattling noise--as though there is a small stone in the heel. (Or, as Kevin would say, dirt in the wheel.) I ask Norik to confirm my noise. He looks on in disbelief that the supposedly "solid" heel of my boot could be making such a sound. Shocked, we decide I must deboot the other foot and compare. The other boot makes no sound.

So we stand in the hall, shaking the noisy boot and trying to figure out the rattle. This is what we are doing when Paul, the man who already thinks I'm insane for talking long-distance on the phone to my dog in Florida, walks by with a concerned expression upon his face. When I try to demonstrate the bizarre incident to him, he runs away fearing for his life.

I shake and shake and shake the boot. Norik and I agree that we can feel whatever it is inside the heel against our hand, and that most likely, it's the core of the heel crumbling. We wish for a drill with which to inspect inside the heel, but since we are lacking, we just decide to shake it some more. Eventually, I put the boot back on, and now I am waiting for the moment when the heel totally crumbles and I roll and break my ankle and fall down a flight of stairs, smashing my head on the fire hose pipe at the bottom, which knocks me unconscious into a coma, causing me to miss my Italian class which Hot Paul takes as a sign that I am not interested in his hotness, so he drops out and joins another level and meets some bored mother-of-three named Rhonda who flirts with him incessantly. All because of my boot.

Clearly, I am too bored at work today.