shoes.

Call me old-fashioned, but I am of the staunch opinion that things should function for the express purpose for which they were intended. I know it might sound a little crazy, but I would never purchase a see-through shirt, a spoon with a large hole in the center of its typically sound basin, or cubic car tires (no matter how well they complimented the shape of my automobile). For me, functionality is primary. My shirts must cover my skin. My spoons must reliably convey to my mouth the brownie batter that I am too impatient to let fully bake. My car tires must facilitate motion. Yet, quite surprisingly, this is not an opinion shared by all. My wife, for one, disagrees with my stance vehemently; namely, it is her position that the primary task of shoes is to be cute. Conversely, I hold that shoes should, if nothing else, aid in walking.

In the name of what they broadly deem "cuteness," my wife and countless other women prance about on footwear that not only fails to aid in, but actually substantially hinders, the task of transporting oneself. These women attempt to prop themselves upon long skinny stiletto heels which fundamentally oppose the physical laws that govern balance and stability, providing virtually unending entertainment for those who feel inclined to perform Youtube searches for such key terms as "Miss USA falls down" and "Maria Shriver hits the deck."

But perhaps this fight in which women are constantly engaged to keep themselves upright is worth it. Perhaps these seemingly deliriously conceived shoes are in fact so supernally comfortable that their inherent inconvenience is merely a figurative bird-sized mosquito that must be endlessly shooed while touring the breath-taking Amazon rainforest. That would be understandable; if that were the case, I could certainly see enduring even a constant lack of balance for the sake of almost otherworldly comfort. Except that's not it at all. These shoes, it is almost universally reported, actually hurt like the freaking dickens. They crowd the toes like ornately polished sardines. They birth and rebirth bunions. Their stark edges can eat straight through skin with severity not altogether different from that ushered in by MRSA, and their practically pernicious absence of padding causes bone spurs to crop up like weeds over an untended grave. Such shoes are hardly suitable for lounging on the couch, much less hiking around the office for eight hours a day. Yet, due to their perceived cuteness, the women of the world persist in every morning strapping themselves into devices which could reasonably be expected to at any time transform a fashionable stroll along the edge of a public sidewalk into a messy demise beneath the massive tires of an oncoming city bus.

When I see my wife roll her ankle right off her high heel and crumble onto the living room rug like a game of Jenga which has reached it natural conclusion, I often wonder about the person who first invented shoes and what he would say if he could see her. "You're missing the point!" he would scream, as he stands in the world's first pair of shoes, which he tirelessly wove from palm branches over the course of six months and then lashed around each foot in hopes of creating a barrier between him and the reef upon which he must daily tread while mostly unsuccessfully throwing spears at much-too-fast fish swimming in the water below. "How, in shoes like that," he will ask both skeptically and loudly, "will you be able to track the water buffalo needed to feed your family? What if a wooly mammoth charges you? Good luck getting away in shoes like that!" In an expression of true sympathy colliding with exasperation, he would begin to unlash his palm branches and offer them to Angela, that she might have some decent footwear for once.

All this talk might make it seem as if I am opposed to the idea of high heels for the sake of aesthetics. That is not the case at all. I can see the appeal. I am not entirely immune to the concept of fashion over function. Really. I just think that if there is a time in a woman's life wherein she ought to enjoy footwear that is eye-pleasing but counter productive for walking, that time ought to come in the period before which walking becomes a major facet of life. This is why I've recently become a cash investor in a new product line aimed exclusively at infant females. It's called Baby High Heels and it is precisely what it sounds like. Since our main clientele merely rolls around on the floor or is carried by people equipped with the necessary footwear for standing, functionality is of no concern at all. Subsequently , the world's shoe designers are now free to really let loose in the creation of footwear that is strictly fashionable in the purest sense of the word. Twenty-inch long stiletto heels? Well, if the shoes are never to be walked on, why the heck not? Gigantic flowers the size of an adult cranium hot-glued to the top of a shoe's toe area? There's no tripping if there's no walking; let's go for it! Bedazzling atop bedazzling atop bedazzling until the shoe is essentially a sparkling disco ball into which a parent slides the child's foot? It's already in production.

I would wager a healthy sum that even the inventor of the world's first palm-branch shoes so many thousands of years ago would look at a baby clad in disco ball pumps and think to himself "See, now that makes sense."