It's good to see you've got time after boot camp to get stoned before you start your job.
"What did you learn in boot camp?"
"Er... 46 ways to lace boots?"
NB store employee to me: "Do you use a runner's lace?" Me: "I just use the ones that come with the shoe?" Oops.
I bought a pair of hiking sandals (don't judge me) and they don't have laces in a way that I understand them. They just have a little elastic string that you can tighten with a slider. I don't like how it feels, but I've so far been too lazy to change it.
4: Awww. I have a pair of toddler-esque Keens too, Mobes.
I'm trying to decide if I should wear them hiking or not. They seem to grip the ground about as well as my boots (also Keens), but they don't seem to hold my foot as well. However, they don't turn into a foot-sauna either.
Which is why I keep meaning to put regular laces in them. It's not a comfortable feeling to step down and feel the tread of the shoe grip the ground but your foot to still slip a couple of inches in the shoe.
I needed shoelaces and went to what appeared to be a shoe store, but was actually a work boot store, that didn't sell shoelaces but just handed them out to anyone who had earlier bought their work boots. So they handed me some free work boot laces. Turns out shoelaces come in different kinds! These are hard to loosen. They stay put.
Ian's Shoelace Site is one of the treasures of the pre-"2.0" web.
Style-wise, it looks like Pen Island.
I just use mine for water sports.
So it's awesome? I haven't found it to be awesome.
It's amazing to me that ogged apparently went around in shoes laced shoe shopwise and hadn't noticed or taken offense! Ataraxia—it really is real.
There's a story here. As I went for a job interview last month, it occurred to me: wow, this is my first job interview in 17 years. Then I had another, even more remarkable, realization: I had been wearing the same shoes to the last one. Which is to say, I almost never wear these shoes because, even independent of the laces, they're uncomfortable.
For sale: job-interview shoes, twice worn.
8.last: Maybe the trick is not to buy your footwear online, but to go to a store with trained salestaff who can help you find the correct size, rather than a sandal 2 sizes too big.
They're the right size. It's just that the elastic lace has much more given than I'm used to.
If you don't buy a size or two above with sandals you'll never be able to wear them with thick socks, though.
Are there more ways to leave your lover or tie your shoes?
Huh. "Hidden knot" lacing is particularly ugly, and somehow or other I once wound up with a pair of shoes laced like that, just straight lines across and across (probably got them at a thrift store) and had to immediately correct the situation. It was just so ... wrong.
On the other hand, C.I.A. Lacing sounds pretty awesome: "This set of methods was taught to C.I.A. officers during the Cold War as a form of covert signalling, using straight segments interpersed with one or more visible crossovers at different positions."
It's interesting to note that various lacing methods free up the foot in various ways for various purposes -- this is information I can use!
Most booksellers do have a foot fetish.
I was always sort of intrigued by my skinhead friends' use of straight lacing on their Docs, but never intrigued enough to ask how they did it.
Back in my day all self-respecting punks wore their Docs with straight lacing. The racist skins just used white laces and everyone else used black laces while anti-racist skinheads would sometimes use one black and one white lace for the Two Tone effect.
Yeah, by the time I was coming up, there had been so many different regimes of shoelace color for one's Docs that most people had pretty much given up on trying to ascertain anyone's politics from their laces. Lots of the punx did wear Docs, but veganism was just getting big, so a lot of people were switching to those canvas Israeli paratrooper boots. With just regular self lacing, far as I can remember.