I walked for an hour and a half this morning around the city in bare feet and I can really feel the effects. My soles are a bit sore from abrasion and pebbles and such and my muscles in my legs are reacting to the new walking style. It feels really good though, very reminiscent of a training montage.
Montage! I am going to get tougher and stronger and hopefully as time goes by it will become a lot more comfortable. I am still getting a lot of strange looks as I walk and I assume that will continue.
I had a very amusing interaction with an elderly lady on the street yesterday. I held open a door for her and she saw my bare feet and gave me a dirty look and then said, "I heard on the radio that if you wouldn't lick something with your tongue than you shouldn't be willing to walk there with bare feet, it is bad for you."
Wut?
Has that person on the radio ever been to a beach? I don't regularly indulge in beach-sand-lickery, but the joy of submerging my toes in sand at the beach is simply sublime and I am confident I am not alone in either of these feelings! Setting aside that example for a moment I must wonder what this sort of instruction is meant to accomplish. Is the idea to make sure everyone wears shoes all the time for propriety reasons? I have no interest in licking my bed linens, should I wear shoes to bed too?
I have found some people who think my little project is great and even one person who asked for regular updates, which was very nice coming directly after 'bare skin paranoia' elderly lady. I wonder if there is some attribute of people that would be strongly correlated with acceptance of someone doing something slightly strange like this. Perhaps age, urban/rural dwelling, political affiliation or something else would be useful in predicting this sort of reaction. My instinct (thoroughly unscientific, by the way) says that politically left, young, middle to lower class people would be the most accepting of this sort of thing on average but it is only a guess.
Oh my poor carpets...
ReplyDeletePersonally I'm comfortable licking the bottom of my shower.
ReplyDeleteI heard that if you go out in the cold with wet hair you will catch cold. .... or was that, If you go out in the cold with wet hair you will spontaneously get viruses and bacteria.... can't remember.
ReplyDeleteFor the record:
ReplyDeleteI think that this project is awesome. It's fun, interesting, and will challenge others a bit. Good stuff.
This reminds me of your high school project on "what is gross".
Licking fake (but clean) dog poop.
Backwashing yourself.
.... I can't remember the others....
P.S. That's EXACTLY what my feet looked like from my Colombian apartment. Big windows are open all the time there so you just get dust blowing in and it ends up on your feet (no carpets of course). I got really good at washing a foot in the sink while standing on one leg.
ReplyDeleteI remember doing that 'gross stuff' project in high school. I found it absolutely hilarious how disgusted people would be when I would drink my own spit or lick plastic dog doo. In particular I was always shocked by how they maintained their disgust even in the face of logic (and common sense!) that dictated that their disgust was unreasonable.
ReplyDelete