Steep discounts on high heels

Every so often, I return to the Barneys Warehouse Sale like a bird into a window, or whatever the expression is to denote that I never learn. The thing is, I need shoes. Practical but elegant shoes that do not a) fall off as I wear them, or b) make an incredibly loud clicking sound with each step, which describes, respectively, my two non-disintegrated pairs of flats. Why did I think this was the solution? (Because once, in early college, I found some space-age Japanese Pumas there that are to this day my favorite sneakers. Also because I've looked elsewhere to no avail, and will not bore you with the process-of-elimination leading up to this point.)

It's the tail-end of the sale, so the discounts are steep. But all of the shoes, save maybe one pair per size section, were utterly impractical. And I don't mean impractical in the sense of four-inch-heel pumps one would wear at work but not to work, at a party one hosts but not at one that requires leaving the house. I mean six-inch or higher all-but-needle-thin spikes, similarly high cones ending in a point, and a remarkable number of what would have otherwise been fall or winter shoes with teensy open toes, just open enough to make, say, wearing them outside impossible. They're the kind of shoes that tell you when you look at them skeptically, 'Aha, of course someone like you wouldn't go for this, because this is capital-F Fashion, and you're too bourgeois to appreciate shoes-as-art, or too poor to buy even drastically discounted shoes-as-art, or both.'

Unfortunately, few of the shoes were appealing even as shoes-as-art, but this could have had something to do with the bargain-basement manner in which they were displayed. So what I'm trying to figure out is, does the fact that the sale only has these shoes mean that this is what the women are wearing, or that this is not what the women are wearing, thus the steep discounts?

Craving the sensation of actually wanting to buy something, I took a brief glance at the clothing, by which I mean the jeans, all of which were $50, down from the month's-rent prices to which designer jeans seem to have climbed, all in the time I thought leggings had replaced designer jeans as the thing. In full view of a family of Russian women trying on avant-garde dresses, I found a great pair of jeans by the unfortunately named but apparently very hip brand, Acne, which I proceeded not to buy, because I am indeed neurotic like that. I hope to hold onto this neurosis till at least the end of grad school.

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Totally unrelated, but I just received an NYU email not about Kimmel or Madoff, but an upcoming "Inaugural Latke-Hamentashen Debate" at NYU. Whaaa?