Shoes

I love shoes. Call me a girl if you want, but there's just something about getting new shoes. I got a new pair of shoes in the mail today and the best part about it was that they were free. Free shoes are by far one of the best benefits to working in a shoe store, along with the hefty discount. Unfortunately, that hefty discount sometimes is the bane of my existence because it tempts me into buying another pair of shoes that I do not need whatsoever. I don't know what it is that draws me to a finely crafted pair of shoes, I just seem to have been born with a natural attraction to putting lots of different colored leathers on my feet. They just look so good (if you get the right ones of course; talk to me if you need any shoe buying advice). I have shoes in my side of the closet plus in a shoe organizer in a different closet which I think adds up to a significantly larger amount of shoes than my wife. This, of course, is quite the fuel for teasing as you can probably guess. In addition to loving shoes for myself, I love to look at other people's feet and see what they are wearing when we are out in public. Usually, especially if we are downtown Chicago, I see at least one pair of shoes that I would like to have. It really is a good thing I have a wife who is practical enough to keep me in line. Otherwise, I think I would have enough shoes to wear something different every day.

Pompeii

We recently went to the Field Museum downtown Chicago to check out the new special exhibit called "Pompeii: Secrets from an Eruption." The exhibit was interesting and informative but rather small. Some of the highlights included a digital re-creation of some of the villas in Pompeii and Herculaneum (a nearby city), and several plaster and resin casts of people who had been buried under the surges from Mt. Vesuvius. The bodies were positioned exactly how they were when the surge came down from the mountain in AD 79. It really was quite fascinating. A major emphasis of the exhibit, however, focused on the wealth of Pompeii as evidenced by the possessions found on or near the dead bodies. Elaborate necklaces, earrings, and bracelets were found along with ornate rings and statuettes of gods or goddesses. These valuables and trinkets did not just happen to be on the people when they died. After the initial rain of ash, the Pompeiians had gone back to their homes to retrieve all of their "valuables" and then they were caught unawares by the sudden deadly surges of gas and ash. Basically, their insatiable greed caused their demise. It's interesting what you can learn about a culture when an entire city is destroyed in less than a day. All of this talk about personal valuables and impending disaster led me to think about what our culture would go back for if we were on the brink of destruction. It's that age-old question of what you would take if your house was on fire. Maybe it's our iPods or our video games or some other "valuable" trinket. How many of us would go back to try to help as many people as possible? I can't help but see so many parallels between our culture today and the culture of the "heathen" Pompeiians who worshiped their money, their gold, and their sexual eroticism. Sometimes I fear for this country and what people will say about us in thousands of years. Will we be another Pompeii, buried with our most precious possessions that take us nowhere?