Frankenstein

Friday, February 4, 2011

shirt -- White Stag

pants -- The Limited (thrifted)

shoes -- Dansko (left behind)

I call the shoes that I'm wearing in this picture my Frankenstein shoes, because they're so big and clunky. I feel like I go clomp, clomp, clomp and that I tower over everybody* when I walk around in them -- sort of how I envision Frankenstein. But the similarity ends there, because they are super comfortable shoes. They are also very warm shoes -- they are a bit too big for me, so I can wear heavy socks with them. When I was packing for Europe last winter, these shoes made the cut, and I wore them almost every day, traipsing around Brussels.

They are Danskos, and I'm not sure where I got them from. I didn't buy them, even though the Dansko outlet is a few miles from my house and even though I'm a huge Dansko fan. I'm pretty sure that one of the students who rented a room in my house left them behind when she moved out, and like the scavenger that I am, I kept them. I'm glad that she left them. I wear them a lot, with jeans and mostly in the winter, when big clunky shoes don't look so silly.  

I am a huge scavenger -- between trying to save money and trying to save the Earth, I try to reuse and repurpose as many things as I can. I'm always looking for new ideas on how to reuse things. I love to shop at garage sales, yard sales, thrift stores, secondhand stores, flea markets, and so on. I use Freecycle, and I've even been known to pick up things that were sitting out on the curb. 

I used to be somewhat embarrassed by that -- but lately it seems that my habits or tendencies are being embraced by more and more people. I've even come across new words being coined -- trashion (a fancy way of saying fashionable trash) and upcycled (a fancy way of saying recycling your trash into something that can be used again). I don't know if this is because of the economy, because more people are becoming more environmentally conscious, or because the Internet has given us a way to become more socially acceptable -- you know, there's more power in numbers. For whatever reason, it's pretty cool.

*I'm only 5'4", so even with my Frankenstein shoes on, I still don't tower over anybody!