Shoelaces

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I keep a small whiteboard next to my computer to write notes to myself on. I use the upper-left hand corner of this whiteboard to list topics that I want to blog about at some point, either when something happens with them or in cases like tonight where I feel a need to blog but don’t have anything too pressing to blog about. Sometimes topics will only stay on the board for a couple of days, but sometimes they’ll be on there for much longer. Usually I don’t have a problem remembering why I wanted to write about a given topic, but this isn’t one of those cases. Several months ago, for some reason, I wrote on my whiteboard that I wanted to blog about shoelaces. I must have had other things to blog about there for a while, because for the past few weeks I’ve been looking at the word "shoelaces" on my whiteboard and trying to figure out just what was so compelling about shoelaces that I felt a need to blog about them.

The closest thing I can figure out is that shoelaces played a big part in me buying a new pair of shoes last autumn. The tips of my old shoes had worn out a while ago, and there were huge holes in them that allowed water to seep directly inside. This wasn’t so much of a problem after I graduated and I wasn’t going out that often, but I knew that I didn’t want the Michigan snow to have a way to get right to my toes, so I bought a new pair. (I think I wore my old shoes out so quickly because of the extra wear and tear caused by my dance games.) One thing that bothered me about my old shoes was that they didn’t have the traditional eyelet lacing for the shoelaces; instead there were metal strips that ran along each side of the shoe along the tongue, with thin rectangular holes punched in at regular intervals, and I had to feed the shoelaces in through those. The original laces of both shoes wound up breaking on me near one of these rectangular holes, and I’m positive that the weird lacing design had something to do with that. (My new shoes have the traditional eyelets, so I shouldn’t have worries there.)

For some reason, after the shoelaces on my old shoes broke, I just tied the laces back together instead of using the second pair of laces that came with the shoes. In fact, right now I have a huge collection of "second pair" laces in my closet right now, on a department store clip-hangar next to my sweatshirts. I’m not entirely sure why I would collect shoelaces like I do (get your mind out of the gutter, they’re not safe to use for that), but perhaps one of these days I’ll come across a really great pair of shoes and I’ll be able to use up all of my extra laces when the original laces of that pair of shoes get busted. Maybe it’s just that I can’t bring myself to throw out things that I’ll likely have next to no use for. I’m not really sure.

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