Please Won't You Be My Neighbor?

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.  That's a lie.  It's gray and ugly, and worst of all, raining.  I am told repeatedly that this is not a typical Utah winter, and I am assured that normal winters are much colder, much grayer, but filled with piles of fluffy, powdery snow.  That sounds horrible and wonderful at the same time, like drinking a fine wine while someone takes a lead pipe to your kneecaps. 

Honestly, I don't remember the last time I experienced a typical winter anywhere.  Last year in Idaho, we started off the winter (or mid-late fall to most people) with monstrous amounts of heavy, wet snow that, had my jobs and the grocery store been outside of walking distance, would have paralyzed me and my economy car completely.  The previous winter in New Jersey brought more snow than I can remember.  More snow than anyone alive can remember.  For realsies.  Snowiest winter on record.  After the sky finished it's bulimic snow-purge onto the Eastern seaboard, we had about a four foot high pile of snow in my mom's front yard, between drifting and snow shoveled from the sidewalk. 

Is there even such a thing as a typical season?  Do we ever actually experience weather patterns that make us think, 'Hot damn, this is truly the epitome of spring in this geographic region'?  Or do we always find some flaw in the weather or deviation from our ideals or expectations that prompts us to assure ourselves 'This is highly unusual...surely next summer will be back to normal'?  Or is the whole planet just going completely cray-cray, as both Al Gore and the Mayans have so wisely prophesied?

But I digress.  I didn't intend to go on a tirade about the most banal small talk topic of all time.  My intended topic, folks, is one Mr. Fred McFeely Rogers.

from Wikipedia

I am him.  He is me.  We are one.

Aside from our mutual, undying love of cardigans, we share a very important trait.  You see, I have developed a curious habit of late.  I change my shoes when I enter the building.  I am now the person who walks to work in one pair of shoes, and changes into another when I get there.  You are probably thinking, 'Hey, that's not so weird, a lot of women walk to work in sneakers and put on heels when they arrive.'  But that's not it. 

The last three times I wore high heels (because those are the only times I can remember between high school proms and now) I was also preposterously drunk and wearing a dry-clean-only silk dress.  I don't do either of those two things at work, so why would I wear heels, either?  I'm not fancy, or short, or a masochist.   (Interestingly, Mr. Rogers was none of those things, either, as long as you believe that devoting over 30 years of your life to filming a wholesome children's show with spooky hand puppets and a "mailman" who maybe should have been on a sex offender registry wasn't painful.  Coincidence?)

So, why do I change my shoes when I get to work?  (The real question should be, why don't I change my clothes when I get to work, because let me be frank and admit that by the time I get there I am sweating like Rick Santorum at a gay pride parade because I am never not running late and therefore always power walking like an a-hole.)  I change my shoes because I am the proud but smotheringly overprotective mother of these babies:

Steve Madden

They're so pretty.  I could never taint them by trudging through snow, slush, puddles, or dog poo (seriously, people of Utah, why do you let your dogs crap on the sidewalk?).  I can't bear to damage them, so I wear them only on dry surfaces.  Every morning, I carefully pack them in my backpack with my lunch (don't worry, Mom, the food is in a separate compartment) and lace up my trusty 8 year old Doc Martins so I can speed-toddle down the street over the solid ice that forms on the sidewalks after anti-social homeowners don't shovel the snow in front of their houses and then people inevitably walk on it and pack it down.  Yes I have fallen.  No I'm not injured.  Yes I was annoyed.  Nobody saw (I hope).

I love a good pair of Docs.  Don't get me wrong.  But they don't really go with a lot of my clothes, and they kind of make me feel like Frankenstein.  But they are officially the only pair of shoes I own with any traction (snow boots might be a solid investment, but I like to deprive myself of functional items just for S's and G's).  And they are so comfortable.  Thus, I enter work looking from the knees down as if the 90s just coughed up a hairball.  Daria called, she wants her footwear back.  What?  But then I scurry into my cubicle and slip into these beauties and all is right with the world.  If loving my boots this much is wrong, I don't want to be right.