Apr 27, 2008
This article is amazing. I’m going to be wearing moccasins soon. Or flip flops in Brasil. Havaianas!
In a 1997 study, researchers Steven Robbins and Edward Waked at McGill University in Montreal found that the more padding a running shoe has, the more force the runner hits the ground with: In effect, we instinctively plant our feet harder to cancel out the shock absorption of the padding. (The study found the same thing holds true when gymnasts land on soft mats—they actually land harder.) We do this, apparently, because we need to feel the ground in order to feel balanced. And barefoot, we can feel the ground—and we can naturally absorb the impact of each step with our bodies. “Whereas humans wearing shoes underestimate plantar loads,” the study concluded, “when barefoot they sense it precisely.”
How We’re Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take — New York Magazine
May 31, 2005
L. was also wearing tie-dye. She is so not like me.
I think I might start telling people that my parents were killed by hippies. That being the source of my hatred of them. Maybe I was in the room when it happened and they were wearing patchouli and every time I smell patchouli now, I get flashbacks. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When I smell patchouli. That’s good.
Maybe it would have been a ritual killing. The hippies tied my parents and my sister and myself to our dining room chairs (the ones given to us by my great-grandma) and put some Grateful Dead on the turntable. The record was scratchy because hippies don’t take good care of things; look at their dogs. Jesus.
P.T.S.D. from patchouli and from the Dead. And they did a whirling dervish dance around us, the leader saying, “Man, you just don’t know about how you people are putting us down, man. Cause we’re on our trip, man, and you just keep fillin’ our lives with your death, man.” See, my mom worked for Dow Chemicals and this was some sort of retribution. “We’ll let your kids live, man, but, you know, you have to go. Poisoning the air with your oppression.”
I hate hippies.
