Day 18: ORCA Finale

Hayley and I worked our butts off on the ORCA. We spent countless hours in the family history section of the library searching through twenty year old yellow page ads. And it wasn't the most enjoyable search, either. It was long and tedious. I think that's the definition of research, though. Disclaimer: I learned a lot and I'm glad that we did it. But it was definitely hard work.

It pretty much came to an end when we presented at the Mary Lou Fulton Conference, or should I say, when we hung up a poster and let people look at it. I think I had one person talk to me the entire two hours I sat there. He was a nice chap. But that isn't what I'm talking about here. I thought that this was a low key kind of thing (it was free to enter!) so I was definitely in jeans and a semi nice shirt, but not really. No one else was in jeans. I had also decided to wear my new shoes for the event. Big mistake. It was a 20+ minute walk to work, and then I had to walk up to the Wilk and there was a lot of standing and these shoes were definitely not responding well to the breaking in process, nor were my feet. Long before I had to sit by the poster I had already tried sticking my jeans into the back of my shoes to ward off blisters. I had also tried tucking the top of the shoes down to walk on top of the ridge to stop the rubbing. It didn't work. I definitely walked home barefoot.

How stupid was I? Who wears jeans to a conference? That's the girl that wore these shoes: the stupid girl that doesn't understand how to dress for an occasion, the girl that walks in pain to wear cute shoes, the girl that followed others. That's not who I want to be. I want to be polished, cultured and knowledgeable. I want to be my own person and make my own way. The only problem at this point is that I'm scared of failing, or of really wanting something and never getting it. But here's to continued progress.

Since starting these shoe posts, I have now worn these shoes a second time. The second time I wore them just up to campus and back home. I still got a slight blister.