The Want Monster

The Want Monster has me in his spiky clutches. Oh, he's really roughing me up.

Here's what I want:

(They're Manolos. If anyone knows the name of this particular style, please let me know so I can begin a wistful and probably-fruitless search for a pair.)

I saw them a few months ago in a magazine and cut this picture out & put it on my Style Board:

(Note the box of tissues. You know, for the frustrated weeping.)

where I stared wistfully at them almost every day. I never located them anywhere else, I looked on the web but never saw them. And then, two weeks ago while in the Northpark Mall Neiman Marcus store in Dallas -- what to my wondering eyes should appear? Oh, and even more glorious than imagined -- they were patent!!! ::heavenly choir sings::

(I'm beginning to worry that my current rabid fetish for patent leather is a bit unsavory. Is this a known disorder, can anyone tell me?)

There it was. On sale. Just sitting there on the rack -- I didn't even have to involve an SA. I just reached out my shaking hand... and... lifted it up. I wobbled a little, walking to a tuffet on which to perch in order to de-boot myself and slide this little masterpiece on my foot.

Call me Cinderella, baby. I seriously looked around for a prince, or at the very least a crystal carriage. The size 39 fit me like Mr. Blahnik had been caressing my foot moments before he designed this little beauty. You can't really tell from the picture, but that snubbed toe is actually open. It's like a cross between a peep-toe and a toe shoe. A little odd, yes, but I am all down with the odd, and I just found them heart-stoppingly beautiful.

My friend Sian the English Rose says that no one makes your foot look prettier in a shoe than Manolo Blahnik and she is right. (And believe me, friends, she has done the research to back this up.) I was completely in love with my own foot in this shoe. (Potentially another psychiatric disorder, I realize.)

Thing is, even on sale these bad boys were well over 300 smackers and friends, I just can't do it. Can. Not. Do. It. I cannot spend $345 on a pair of shoes, especially immediately post-Christmas and with possible travel plans this spring.

Hence the Want Monster. Awful, hateful, ugly, mean ol' Want Monster. The Want Monster is not the Oh-I-Could-Use-One-of-Those Imp, or the When-I-Get-My-Next-Paycheck Gremlin. Those guys are lightweights and they usually only stick around briefly. No, the Want Monster, once he gets hold of you, is probably not going away for a while. He's beating you to death with that unbelievably perfect item that clutches at your heart and makes you cry tears of pure desire, an item that is probably so massively overpriced/difficult to find/unsuited to your figure/located in another historical period that you are never going to get your sticky fingers on it.

I see the Want Monster a lot more than I'd like. My positive spin on my frequent tussles with this guy is that I have magnificent taste and so of course I'm often going to run up against things I want but cannot afford, the independently wealthy husband having not yet presented himself. My less charitable take on it is that I am a bad, greedy, selfish girl who is trying to fill the holes in her soul with consumer goods. (But that's usually only after several glasses of wine.) Whatever the reason, the bastard knows where I live. And what kind of shoes I like.



Do you have a Want Monster? What's he bludgeoning you with right now?