Giving my heels the boot

For the last ten years - minimum - my feet have been subject to severe torture on account of my refusal to not wear heels.

Given the fact that I'm a Dutch girl, I'm not very tall: 1.68 meters, or about5.5 feet. Sadly, most of that length consists of torso, not leg. Ergo: since I was 18, I've been wearing heels. Mostly high heeled boots, but also pumps, peeptoes and all of the other gorgeous but painful footware out there.

Recently, we went to the zoo with some friends. Because I didn't want to uncomfortably try to rest my feet every 5 minutes by sitting on the small walls enclosing the animals' habitats, I bravely decided to go stumpy legged for a day. So I put on the sneakers I normally only wear in the gym.

What a fine day it was! I felt like I could keep on walking all day. While driving back I even sort of missed the burning sensation I normally would have had after a day in the zoo. Or mall. Or at work. Or wherever. I would even wear heels to the beach. For real.

The zoo was about a week ago now. The sneakers have barely been off my feet. It's a shame I'll have to get back to wearing high heeled shoes again.

Because in the end, pretending not to have short legs beats comfort's ass everytime.

(Picture by tcindustry.com)

It's in the little things

Sometimes it doesn't take much to remember why life can be pretty sweet. It's the little moments of uncomplicated happiness that make it worthwhile.

The last couple of days, I've had quite a few of these happy little things happen to me. Here's my top three:

3. Driving up to my house after work, where I see my boyfriend rolling the emptied trash bin back to the house. Without me asking him to.

2. Opening the back door to throw away an empty muesli box in that same bin in the backyard, to find myself part of a true Disney-moment: ridiculously colorful flowers, a lovely spring scent in the air and tons of bird singing their little hears out.

3. Taking the freshly washed towels out of the dryer, and holding each and every warm and clean smelling towel to my face before folding it.

Simple, but very very effective.

Hallelujah, Lisa!

Lisa Hordijk is a 21-year old Dutch girl blessed with a powerful and beautiful voice, full of character. She just won the Dutch talent show X-Factor. A minor miracle indeed. I think it is the first time someone who can really, truly sing won a show like that. Yay! Go Lisa!

Now Lisa is not stick thin. On the contrary, she's a big girl.

One of the X-Factor judges, record label owner Stacey Rookhuizen, managed to make my skin crawl with just one incredibly stupid remark. I'm sure the little twig didn't mean to, and I'm curious whether I'm the only one who picked it up.

Here goes. Here's what she said: "Lisa, you're an example to so many ... girls." She literally paused before the word 'girls'. She did!

Maybe it's my personal agression towards the ridiculously thin, but I can't help to think that what she really wanted to say was "You show other fat girls that they cán be popular."

Lisa only flinched for a nanosecond. In that nanosecond she still gave the twig a killer look of death though. Or maybe that was my imagination.

The thing is: who cares. It's so great that such an impressive voice will now be heard. I actually bought the mp3 of Lisa's first single, a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's one youtube already, ofcourse: