by tess
There is a blue oodle of unhinged people out there who espouse lifestyles alternative to my own mundane and insignificant existence. That’s cool, the world is a big place and there’s room for everyone so I’m happy to embrace the vast majority of lifestyle choices. Except for the whack-a-mole loonies commonly known as foot fetishists.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve never seen particularly attractive feet. Unlike my own freakishly wee, baby-sized toes, my mom has these alien-sloth toes that must be six inches long. Her second toe is longer than her thumb toe; Wikipedia informs me that’s due to a condition called Morton’s Toe. Following that brief description was a lot of science mumbo-jumbo that sounded like blahblahblah-toes-blahblahblah. I did note, however, that the article failed to reference the superior intelligence of mutant-long-second-toed people to those of us who are toe challenged. So just like Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Boob Goblin, and the Tooth Fairy, another mother-spawned myth has been obliterated.
My feet are admittedly monstrous. I don’t properly respect them and I refuse to mollycoddle them. I know that there are women (and I suppose men) who pamper their feet with a vast array of ointments and instruments. I don’t. My infinitesimal toenails are cropped weekly and my crunchy, disgusting heels are loofah’d sporadically. Otherwise I abjure everything beneath my ankles.
Some women live for their mani-pedis. And just because I don’t relish spending hours at a spa or salon doesn’t mean I am unable to fathom their much-indulged pleasure. At the age of 62, my sister-in-law married the first man who rubbed her feet. (That sounds dirty but it isn’t secret code for anything kinky.) She literally fell in love with the man who was willing to massage her feet. We spent a week with them not long after their honeymoon and, not surprisingly, Felix would have sold his soul to never stroke another needy toe. Alas, poor Felix the Feet Kneader is now, and will be until his death, accountable for his wife’s foot bliss.
I lobster-hate it when people touch my feet under any circumstances but I temporarily shook off my resistance to pedicures a few years ago. I wanted to wear pretty sandals without terrorizing small children who happened to look down. The pedicurist’s grating and poking and scraping and clipping and rasping and grinding of my feet was massively uncomfortable but did result in less heinous-looking feet. I’ve since discovered that to ask your pedicure technician to be gentle is to ensure that her Inner Himmler will be wielding the implements of pedi-torture.
During my final excursion to pedicure-land I was seated beside a woman with monstrously long toenails. Remember those pictures in The Guinness Book of World Records of people with super-long fingernails? That’s how terrifying her long, yellow, curled toeclaws were. None of the young nail technicians spoke much English and they assumed we would misunderstand their gawking and giggling. It would have been impossible for old Pterodactyl-Toes to disregard their scorn and horror. That was my last pedicure. My escalating germ phobia and pain aversion weren’t quite enough to dissuade me, but once I realized that young girls might gossip about my feet, I quit cold turkey.
So now I’m left to fend for myself. My inflexibility contorts and my obesity undulates as I flail toe-ward with clippers, scissors, and files. Finally breathless and cramped I offer thanks to all the gods and goddesses for the foot-phobia that saved me from becoming a pedicurist or a podiatrist. Barely able to tolerate my own feet, it would be a living nightmare to fondle those of others. Gack.
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