Shoes and Buses

This morning the girl showed me a badge she had found (somewhere in the house) and wanted to wear to pre-school. It was a pretty pink badge with a fairy on it. Nice, just the thing a cute little girl could wear on her jacket. Except this badge, apart from being very cute, also happened to say "click your heels together three times and go fuck yourself". So I considered her request: the fact that she can't read, none of the other kids at pre-school can read – actually the majority of them can't even speak English – was working in her favour, but in the end I decided it probably wasn't a good idea for her to wear it. I tried to explain that it had a bad word on it and wasn't appropriate for pre-school and eventually she relented.
After I dropped her at pre-school I headed out to Belconnen to go to a shoe shop, the Foot Locker to be precise. I have been doing quite a bit of exercise recently, going to the gym and stuff, and since I spend so much time in exercise gear I decided to upgrade to something half decent. At the Foot Locker store at Woden I found some gym shoes that were black (oh my god!) and had a very subtle gold design in the stripes and were actually quite attractive. Of course they didn't have my size. So I rang the Belconnen store and asked about them, unfortunately I didn't know the brand or the model number but I figured since they were the only black gym shoes (probably in the southern hemisphere) it shouldn't be a problem. Blandberra has a strange staffing thing going on where it seems to be illegal to employ anyone over the age of 15. This is across all areas of retail and hospitality – wherever you go, whatever shop or café you venture into you can be 99% guaranteed to be served by a small child who can barely see over the counter. So speaking to the sales person wasn't so much as akin to speaking to a surly teenager – I actually was speaking to a surly teenager who informed me that his shop stocked several different black women's gym shoes and he couldn't possibly help me with so little information. I said to the husband "I bet they don't have ANY black women's gym shoes" and decided to go and look for myself. I was wrong, they had one pair of cross-trainers that were black, had fringing on them and were hideous. They didn't have any gym shoes at all.
I wandered about the shopping mall, a Westfield (aren't they all?) and marveled at how they can perfectly reproduce shopping malls, much like McDonalds stores, no matter where you go they are all the same. I guess this is supposed to be comforting, the safety of familiarity and all that, I find it unsettling, disturbing and quite sad. One thing Blandberra does not seem to have in any form is strip shopping (stripPER shopping – yes), every shop is contained within a shopping centre. Boring.
Driving back home to collect the girl from pre-school I was following a bus that had a poem in the back window, promoting national poetry week. The lettering of the poem was large enough so that I could read the first bit of it while we were stopped at an intersection, but then had to chase the bus down the freeway and tailgate until I could read the rest of it. It was a nice poem, the first line was something like "he knocked on the hard wood of the casket", so you can understand why I had to read the rest. Needless to say that I was concentrating so hard on tailgating the bus and reading the poem that I missed the turnoff I needed and had to take the very scenic route home. It was worth it though, a nice poem does wonders for the soul, and indeed lack of sole.
Tomorrow at pre-school is a birthday party, the girl needs to wear party clothes and take a present and party food. She will no-doubt go dressed as Snow White or a fairy, I bought some fruit sticks (domestic goddesses have days off too) and the present is a big red spider that has one of those little traction wheelie things in it so it will scoot along the floor. Like the badge says…