If the Shoe Fits

I wear shoes sized about 10, sometimes 9 ½, sometimes 10 ½ . So what does that mean?
And why is a men's size 10 a different size than a woman's size 10? Why not just tell me the interior dimensions of the shoe? That way I would always know which shoe fits my foot, whether it's a steel toed work boot or a color coordinated pump, which, of course, I know nothing about.

When I go buy a pair of Levi's, I can look at the label and grab a pair that is 29inches around the waist and 32 inches long (ok, ok, maybe I couldn't actually squeeze into them, but I could find them). I don't have to look for a size 18 ½ and guess at what the real dimensions are. I know, it's not uncommon for women's and kids clothing to go by sizes. But I digress?

So, I usually wear a size 10 shoe, but when I buy one of my favorites, and an American classic I might add, Converse Allstars, I wear a 9 ½ . The shoe salesman will proudly proclaim that "Converse tend to run big", as if to assure me that he is indeed well versed in the internal workings of the shoe manufacturers and therefore worthy of my business. Now as much as I love Converse, let's be frank; They don't run big, they are just labeled wrong! If any given shoe company is consistently a ½ size off so as to warrant the "They tend to run big" comment for over 50 years, why don't they suck it up, admit they are wrong and label the dang thing right (as right as they can using a 0.5 increment numbering system instead of a more accurate form of measurement).

Furthermore, kids have their own sizing and once they reach a certain point (size 13) they get to start over as a real person, at size 1. Again, why don't we just indicate how long the shoe is and let us figure out the rest. This brings up another stinkin' labeling disaster; baby clothes. Yeah, according to my calculations every child in the US no matter how large or small they were at birth, no matter how "big boned" their parents are, no matter how many mashed peas and carrots they've been eating, should, in theory, be the same size when they are 9months old, so let's just label the clothes by age instead of size!

Although the whole shoe and clothes sizing schemes are very interesting and could merit their own columns, they are not the crux (interesting word - crux) of this article.

I would like to go a bit deeper and explore an even bigger mystery: sock sizing. Socks have their own sizing chart, one that is totally different than the shoe sizing chart.

So, if my foot is 10 7/8 inches long, I need a size 9 ½ shoe and a size 13 sock. Genius. Furthermore, that size 13 sock says right on the package "Fits shoe size 9-12". Now come on, if my foot is different enough to require a different shoe size, shouldn't I also get the option to wear a different sized sock? Maybe I will go back to wearing the ever fashionable tube socks, at least they don't have a pre-determined heal reinforcement, so nobody knows if they really fit or not.

And another thing, why can't I get a pair of socks that are not, for lack of a better word, ambidextrous? The front of my foot is not shaped like a brick, why is my sock? Just for the record, I am aware of some socks that are foot specific, but I am NOT going to were anything with multicolored, individually wrapped toes!

Well, somewhere along the line, a person much more blog-knowledgeable than myself told me that I should keep my blogs short and sweet. I don't do sweet very well, so I'm gonna try to adhere more closely to the first part. But at the same time, by visiting a blog entitled "Endless Rambling", you should inherently expect that some posts will be somewhat opposite of "short and sweet".

Until next time...put a sock in it.