Sockless at work. A first for me. White people don’t like to show their feet, as a Romanian woman once extolled unto me. I don’t need the discomfort or the extra layer. Still, I surveyed this workplace and found that not a single male employee wore sockless sandals or shoes that would expose their feet. With women it was relatively common. I did finally see one guy yesterday, socklessly wearing heavy flip flops. That was my breakthrough decision-making moment. He was not actually part of this company. He boarded the elevator from the floor of some other company. But he was in this building, and that could be my excuse if some dress code police force sees my beautiful feet and says NO. The dress code police would seriously have to be looking for it, though. These are Teva sandals, not open flip flops, which I don’t understand how anyone can dare to wear in the city. You could step into broken glass or dog shit almost anywhere and you are basically naked to it. These shoes are more comprehensively wraparound in protection save for the fact that one of them has at least one hole in the bottom. There may be more but I am afraid to look. Because of this the shoe makes a kind of kissing, or squeaking noise (depending on the floor surface) whenever I walk across a non-carpeted floor. It makes me feel like a poorie because it signals the fact that I cannot afford new shoes at this time, and I lack a pair of backup shoes that I could use should I decide to get the holes in shoes fixed. I wonder if other people hear it that way. Do they hear the poorie squeak, the poorie kiss of the holey shoe? If they do take stock of the floor-kissing hole in my shoe they will be more likely than others to notice today’s socklessness. They will comment and discuss, questioning if I am too poor even for a fresh pair of socks. Truth is I chose socklessness this day, but remain aware that letting one’s soles get filthy with dustblobs and dirt is very unbecoming in environments where the bottoms of one’s feet are on display. That is not today’s environment, except that the bottoms of my shoes will be on the minds of people who decide in silence that my shoes and the sounds they make define me, define my profile and character. I have to say, the feet feel different this way. Now, this is not new to me. Typically on a non-work day I am sockless to the hilt, from the tip of the toes to however high a sock might reach up my leg. But this is new to this environment, so forgive me for exploding with words and anxieties about the situation.