An un-EZ feat: or, bunny slippers

My wife vacuumed today, thereby discovering the various tracks of mud I had tried so diligently to hide. One pencil doesn't cover much, but if you throw in a paperclip here, an index card there, and maybe a couple of stacks of books, it's impossible to see the stain so long as you are careful never to pick the stuff up. Well, apparently if you track in mud, cover it up with things, then have your wife take those things away, not only is the mud stain still there, it is "ground in." Because my wife is not keen on mud stains being permanently ground into the carpet, she has asked me to abstain from wearing my sneakers inside the house. I must "abstain from the stain," if you will. (Silly puns ease the sense of pain.)

This is very hard for me. For one thing, my feet get cold without sneakers. For another thing, I have weak ankles, and I have a recurring fear that I will re-injure my left ankle in some sort of bizarre tripping accident that would have been prevented if I were wearing sneakers. ("Doctor, what's the cause of death?" "Socks, Nurse Hammin. Socks, and the failure to wear sneakers.") They also provide good foot support if you are prone to do weird things like pace around the house while you are reading, which is something I like to do. Well, my wife said, "Why don't you go buy some slippers? There are even some slippers that are designed for you to walk a lot." Now, I am not a slipper kind of guy. Slippers just makes me think of pink bunny rabbits. I suppose if they were pink and/or white killer rabbits (see above), that would be different. Otherwise, they are goofy and/or emasculating. I wanted raw unadulterated power slippers, if I were to have any at all.

So, I want to Wal-Mart and into the men's shoes section. Immediately I found "EZ Feet slippers Active at home: designed to keep you one step ahead" slippers. Now, the big poster does not say "Men's slippers," but given that it's in the men's section, that should be a no-brainer, right? Well, then why is there a picture of a smiling woman on the advertisement? Are they suggesting that, by wearing these slippers in the privacy of your own home, this smiling woman will somehow discover you wear slippers and want to date you? Or does it really mean that these are women's slippers placed in the men's shoes section?

I tried to look for other clues. The slippers themselves did not have any of the common social cues for femininity, such as pinkness or fluffy animals, just a whitish gray. The advertisement background was orange, which, while not a manly color like blue or deathlike black, seemed indeterminate to me. So I went wandering around in the women's section and found, "EZ-Slippers Men's Relax at Home," replete with manly blue background. But relax at home? How could they pretend that it was manly blue if all the guy was going to be doing was relaxing and/or drooling sleepily in front of the tv?

So then I walked back over to the orange advertisement. And then I walked back over to the blue advertisement. Just because the pansy blue one was for men didn't mean the active burly orange one was for women. I don't even know why buying the "wrong" one worried me so--I mean, suppose I bought the orange one, and it was actually intended for women. It wasn't like I was going to be wearing it in public and have young hooligans say to me on the street, "Go up, woman-slippers!" and then I'd have to pray to God to send some bears to maul them for me. Nevertheless, I was much a-feared of getting wrong slippers.

Well, finally I figured out the clincher argument: none of the orange advertisement slippers were even in my size. They must only be for women! So it meant my only choice was to get weakling lazy slippers or burly woman's not-fitting me slippers, which is no choice at all. I finally just opted for a second pair of sneakers, which I will only wear inside the house (presuming I don't forget).

Still somewhat disgruntled about the slipper-buying experience, I decided to go to the EZ feet website and compare the available men's slippers and women's slippers. Apparently, even though EZ feet does offer both "active at home" and "relax at home" models for women, they only have "relax at home" models for men! Now, if I were a woman, I would probably get really indignant about this and say, "Why is it that they assume only women are going to be 'active at home' and 'do all the housework' and 'not have a career!'" all of which would probably be accurate criticisms. But I am not a woman. I am a graduate student man who wants to pace in active slippers in my own home without being associated with pink non-man-eating bunnies! Help, help, I'm being oppressed!