“It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t like I meant to do it.”
[Shaun Smith, changer of the universe]

Today I changed the universe as I know it. You’ve probably heard the expression “When a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world, it causes earthquakes on another side.” I may have butchered it, but essentially the saying is that everything in the world is connected in some way. Sort of like a cars crashing on a busy highway, or Celine Dion being associated with sinking ships.

I was shopping for shoes and came across a really nice pair in under 20 minutes. And they were on sale. I took a spin (not literally…I just walked in them around the store) in my new shoes and they were comfortable. The chances of these things happening are about as remote as having a really sexy driver’s license photo. It was like I was secretly in a shoe ad for Sport Chek. I was in the zone, as their ads say, and my shoes were going to lead me to great things.

Then it happened. I noticed that the right shoe wasn’t cut the same way the left shoe was. A factory defect. So I did what any innocent shopper would do…I asked if there were any other size 13 shoes in that style. The girl walked to the back and, lo and behold, they did. Who on earth stocks more than one pair of size 13s? Shoe shopping for me has always been a matter of picking ten different shoes that I sort of like and hoping that the store has one of them in a size 13. “Sir, we don’t have that style of shoe available in that style in 13. Would you like these pink ones instead?”

“Absolutely. They bring out the color in my eyes.”

Back in the present, I sat with my two boxes of size 13 shoes and compared them. Did I mention that I really liked the original left shoe? That sounds like I’m trying to justify what I did, but mostly I’m recording it for posterity. Remember, this is where the world changed.

I did a little look around the store, kind of secretly, and I exchanged the right shoe with the poor cut for the right shoe with the really good cut. That’s right. I took the right shoe’s partner and I gave him (they’re male, they’re my shoes) a new partner. I felt kind of guilty (really!), like I had broken up a lifelong relationship or had destroyed some long standing ritual observed by Nike, Asics, and the like. I heard factory-loud alarm bells going off at shoe factories in Nicaragua, China, and just over the border in Mexico. Their collective flashing-red factory warning lights and people gasping in disbelief echoed through my soul. Who knows, perhaps each pair of shoes is weighted differently and the person who gets the other pair will suffer a career ending injury due to shoe weight-balance issues. Maybe one of Canada’s future Olympians will pick up that shoe, stumble because they’re not a “perfect” match and lose out on Owning the Podium: The Summer Edition. They should come with a warning label, really.

It’s not my fault, really. But I just wanted to let you know who changed the world today.

I did.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 29th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under bokchoy, home . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.