Gwennie, Your Challenge Has Opened A Pandora's Box Of Emotions

One of my favorite Blogger buddies Gwen, over at Everything I Like Causes Cancer has reached a blogging milestone. She hit the 600 mark. That's right, 600 posts and still going strong! Way to go Gwen, and a hearty Daily Dandy Congrats for keeping us laughing. Gwen is seriously the best! She is not only completely HILARIOUS, but sweet, smart, generous and caring. The blog world would be so much more of a LOL wonderful place, if there were more Gwens in the bloggersphere, but make no mistake, there is only one Gwen. Go check her out and tell her I sent you. (and if I ever get my butt to St. Louis Gwen, I am so looking you up for a round of drinks)

In honor of her 600th post Gwen asked us to join her in celebrating with her by finding a piece of clothing/footwear/accessory that you can't get rid of.

As she put it:

I suspect everyone has at least one piece of clothing like my pajama top: that pair of shoes you can't seem to throw in the trash despite them being broken down and soleless; that ratty-ass three-quarter-sleeve tee-shirt from the 1986 AC/DC Fly on The Wall tour that is covered in paint stains the same color as your second bathroom; that pair of jeans you finally had to make into cut-off shorts and now you can't get rid of the shorts even though your ass hangs out the bottom like a $2 hooker.

So I want you to do me a favor. Tonight when you get home from work, or today while the kiddos are napping, go find your clothing/footwear/accessory equivalent of my pajama top and take a picture of the revered item. Post the picture on your own blog tomorrow and tell us the story behind it. You don't have to link back to this post because I don't get fussy about stuff like that but please do come back and leave a comment so we can find and enjoy your stories.

I am more than happy to oblige. BUT, little did I know that the item I chose would cause a cacophony of emotions from deep inside me.

You see those raggedy-ass clogs in the picture above? Yeah, they are what's got me into a lather. See, I bought them about three or four years ago at a DSW Shoe Warehouse (read:discount). They are Michael Kors $89.00 cloggy things but I loved them to death....literally. Look at the heel of the shoe on the right, you will see that it has snapped, almost off, just barely hanging by a thread. The thing is, this is not the first time the heel on these suckers have snapped, while I was wearing them. Noooo, this would be the second time, only the first time it was the other shoe's heel that gave out. I contemplated throwing them into the trash then, but decided to research the cost of gluing the wooden heel back on because I became quite attached to the little clogs.

I loved them because they have a great wooden heel (that apparently wasn't strong), and in their prime I wore them to work with dress pants or jeans, as they crossed over into both the casual and office dress genres quite nicely. Not to mention that they are slip ons!! Yahoo for slip ons, I tell you. Easy and looked great. I was in Clog heaven. I always felt great pairing them up with my sexy jeans, they elongated the legs nicely and made be feel sassy.

Now, the good Lord above knows that I own over 6,372 pairs of shoes. Each one unique, some breathtakingly expensive, some not. The initial $89.00 investment on these shoes will be nearly doubled after I have them repaired for the second time, as the first repair cost $45 at my shoe guru's shop. But I can't let them go...After I broke the second shoe, I put them in a bag and threw them in the trash......Then I went back out the garbage can and retrieved them. Yes. I. Did. And I retrieved them again today from my car, so that I could photograph them for you. They've been in there for about a month now, the intention is to get them to the shoe guru, but I keep wrestling with the justification in my mind.

WTF is it with these shoes???? I have bought shoes twenty times more expensive, in less than three seconds, that have never let me down and performed to perfection on command. So what is it about these, inferior, cheaply made, soooo way past the season, clogs that has me in an emotional tailspin?

Christ, I need a shoe psychologist.