I'll stop wearing flip flops when Karl Rove is fired

There are a couple of things that men just should not express opinions on because they will never experience them. As far as I'm concerned, a woman's right to choose is number one.

I speak, of course, of a woman's right to choose her footwear.

Summertime means professional women District-wide can breathe a hearty sigh of relief and merrily flip-flop about town in their Reefs, the best thing to happen to feet since rickshaws. The other eight months of the year, our poor feet are confined to toe-scrunching heels, perenially caught in the cement throughways of our fair city. Do you know what I spend annually on fixing my shoes because of sidewalk potholes? This is why men buy the drinks-- women have outrageous heel-repair bills.

Men of DC, you get to wear socks. Big thick black socks that cushion every step you take with the delicious assurance that no matter how far you walk, your feet will not open up and bleed all over creation. We women get no such comforts. You see those shoes up there? Are they hot? Hells yeah. I own the black ones, and I look damn good in them. However, I can't appreciate the effect because I'm too busy praying for the sweet embrace of death to whisk me away from the all-consuming pain south of my ankles. Those motherfuckers hurt. Let's see how you do walking around all day, every day in three inch heels with your toes smushed into a space roughly the size of an electron.

Remember in Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion when Romy blows off the guy in the club with the line "I have to go, I cut my foot earlier and my shoe is filling up with blood"? That actually happened to a friend in college. We're out being sloppy and silly somewhere in Adams Morgan and she drunkenly commented that she didn't realize the snow was so deep. When we got home, turns out it wasn't slush she'd stepped in, but the discharge from her own blistered, bleeding feet. That, my friends, does not happen with men's dress shoes.

So give us our Summer Shoe Vacation and shut up about it. We wear the hot-yet-painful shoes the rest of the year, in no small part for your viewing pleasure. Until you walk a mile in my shoes, your opinion doesn't count.**

Of course, it wouldn't be a completely pointless conversation without having a George W. Bush link to it. The Northwestern women's field hockey team was invited to the White House to celebrate their NCAA championship, and several of the women dared to don offensive footwear.

Let me get this straight. Our nation is at war, Iraq civilians are dying by the hundreds every week, terrorists are bombing our closest ally with great abandon, Karl Rove intentionally outed a covert intelligence agent and apparently gets to stay in the White House unrebuked. Yet when a national championship team of athletes tries to take a moment to celebrate their phenomenal accomplishment, they get lampooned in the press for being disrespectful.

I admire their restraint. If I were given such access to the White House, not only would I skip in the door wearing Reefs and a wifebeater, but I- GASP- wouldn't get a pedicure.

The horror.


**However, I might be willing to work out a trade-- we'll cut back on the flip flops, but men are never allowed to wear that godawful dress shirt and tie/baggy Abercrombie shorts combo. Do you know how dumb you look when you dress like that? You're not in college anymore, and the world is not your Phi Iota Dickwad Annual Shareholders Meeting/Clambake.