A changeling in converse.

A writer always has a muse. A muse is a person, or a thing, but most usually a person, who inspires them to create. For a good long time now, my muses have either shed too many tears or have been absent because of reasons too mundane to speak of. Instead, I have been spending much more time with a different kind of faerie called WRITERS BLOCK. It's so fascinating the way your brain can just shut down and find everything dull and flat when it was once rich with color and texture and pages full of words.

Today, this hollow, desert wasteland head of mine took a new turn when one of my muses popped back to life.

I think it is fair to say that I have a fairly eclectic collection of shoes. I wear everything from flats, to crocks, to boots, to sandals, all the way up to red four inch heeled peep toe pumps. But by far the best shoes I've ever owned were Converse, Chuck Taylors. Over my life time I have owned several pairs. High tops, low tops, red, pink, black.

My husband never owned a pair until he married me, and being the punky little fairy that I am, I insisted he buy some. Now he has several pairs in several different colors.

In high school, I was well known for my shoes. Low top Converse with 12 different shoelaces. Yes. You read that correctly. 12 different shoelaces- one lace for each set of holes. 6 sets on each shoe. I had one that was rainbow stripes that a friend gave to me for Christmas. Consequently, that shoelace had a small silver jingle bell tied to it. Strawberry Shortcake (the vintage kind) and Rainbow Bright. Stars, and solid blue and red adorned my classic sneakers. They were bright, perky and insanely jarring to the eyes.

It irritated my mother to absolutely no end that I didn't ever untie my shoes when I came into the house. I had great reasons for this. Untieing 12 laces did not sound time efficient to me, and also, we were never allowed to wear shoes in the house. Going in and out was a huge chore when you had to wear tie-shoes. But even more, it bothered my mother that I continually tattooed the things.

In high school, I thought myself a thespian, a bohemian, a poet, and, strangely enough, strange. I had a million different heroes, and most of them were thespians, bohemians, poets, or strange. Several were even Transcendentalists. They were almost always quotes from books or plays, and usually fairly offensive ones. For example:

Thank you William Shakespeare, (Puck from Midsummernight's Dream.) or

from my good friend Henry David Thoreau. Though, the quote on THAT pair of shoes was much longer. It was the whole thing, which read "The greater part of what my neighbors call good, I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well!?"

It wasn't that I was a rebellious teenager. I wasn't. I was a pretty 'good girl'. But I thought myself philosophic. And I suppose, for my age, I was. I loved being different. I loved being an outsider. I loved anyone who made me feel free and alive instead of dull and numb. And these passages filled me with fire. Being raised in an LDS home, it seemed that anything out of the ordinary, anything that demanded attention or screamed in a cynical accent was offensive and rebellious.

When I was a kid, all the way up through college, I wrote in a journal religiously. (Well, remember how I said I am Mormon? Uh..duh.) I had volumes upon volumes upon volumes upon volumes. You get it. And it's so embarrassing. Every passage was about how I hated my mother (I don't.) and how I LOVED a certain boy- and it was different every day. (Obviously, I didn't.) Today I realized that we don't really even NEED to write in journals anymore. All we have to do is go back into the history of our facebook pages. It's all there in our "status" field. How we feel, what we think, what we ate, what we did that day...how we slept. Everything.

I admit it. I am a very self involved person. It's like I feed on compliments and I have to have them. They give me strength. They give me energy. They give me vitality and mojo! So, to see what people would say, in my "status" on my facebook page, I simply typed the word "is..." so that anyone who read is saw "Brae Lee Hansen Craig is...." I wasn't really surprised by the answers. Fairly generic, though thoughtful and sweet, until one of my favorite muses popped up with something so inspiring, I had to change the name of my blog. She said "Brae is...a changeling in converse."

Well, ain't it the truth.

And so, my mind spewed forth the flowers and volcanic lava that is my blog entry about my shoes. And of course, I had to take pictures. What is a story without pictures, right? It also gave me a chance to doodle all over my fairly pristine and new pair of converse. Hooray for art.

There's only one thing about this that makes me a little wary of my Muse's meaning....isn't a changeling in converse the same as a wolf in sheep's clothing?

Reader beware.