I am a comfort shoe snob. I went to Union Square to check out Nordstrom and Macys to look for shoes, but only saw f-ugly shoes! They look like silly little torture chambers for unsuspecting women who want to walk with a sway in their hips.

Yes, they're pretty if you like trashy f-ugly shoes but they look so uncomfortable. I don't know. Maybe if I didn't have that stupid problem with my feet a few years ago, I wouldn't be so down on uncomfortble shoes but I did and once you start wearing comfortable shoes you can't go back to uncomfortable ones.

But I don't want just comfortable shoes, I want stylish comfortable shoes with more than a one-inch heel. I hate flat heeled shoes.

Most women who start wearing fashionable stylish shoes in their youth, start only wearing athletic shoes in their old age or ugly Birkenstocks or Dexters or other old lady type shoes. Talk about feeling like you are seriously over the hill and going down the drain in nanosecond whenever you look down at your shoes.

I think it's better to wear comfortable yet stylish shoes with 2 inch heels, so you at least look and feel young.

I should start a list of the things NOT to do to look old.

1) NO SHORT MANNISH HAIR - all women over a certain age have short hair, it's like a disease or epidemic or something. Okay, maybe Annette Benning can get away with it, but if you don't look like Annette Benning or a Hollywood movie star or a Hollywood movie star, forget it. Keep the hair shoulder length or longer. Besides, hello, it's not the 80's anymore and that Dorothy Hamill do went out a really, really long time ago.

2) NO OLD LADY SHOES - another dead give away about your true age, especially those Dexter shoes!

I'm sure there's more for this list, but these are my major pet peeves about women over a certain age. They look so, what is the word, Stepford wifeish, only worse. It's like after you what, turn 40 or old, you get this list on how you're supposed to look, and boy do most women follow it. It's like they cloned the middle aged woman look all over America. It's so frightening. Don't succumb! And if you're not over 40, don't start the look early!

Fight, fight the middle age woman cloning of America!

So I'm so upset. I bought a pair of $80 Born mary jane shoes back in 2003, and last night during greek drama class I noticed that the sole of my left shoe was split in half. I took the shoes to the shoe repair shop across the street from work, and the shoe shop repairman tells me that he can't fix it and it's a factory defect.

God, I hate that. I love these shoes. They are so comfortable and so cute, and now they're broken. What is up with that? I've never had a fairly new shoe split like that before.

So I don't know if I should go back to Nordstrom to see if they're still selling the shoe sand repurchase them, or just get another pair of shoes. And in the back of my mind of course I'm thinking, what if the damned shoes split in in half again a year and half later.

What is the point of paying $80 for good european shoes if they break?

I went to a seminar on Saturday in Moutain View at the East West Bookshop and had lunch with the couple sitting next to me. They were such an interesting couple. The man was a nuclear physicist in the Johnson Administration, who told me he quit along with a bunch of other scientists when Johnson wanted nuke North Vietnam. He left the government and went to work in the communications industry, and was one of the scientists responsible for coming up with the technology to put communication satellites up in space.

They were such nice people, and they even paid for my lunch as well. I often meet the most interesting people in Silicon Valley seminars.

So I'm thinking maybe I need an IPOD now as I filled my bag this morning with my Jimi Hendrix cd collection so I could listen to that song that it turns out wasn't even by Hendrix.

I'm listening "Electric Ladyland" and the song playing "Come On, Part 1" and I'm having flashbacks to stoner parties in high school and college. I haven't listened to Hendrix in a long, long time, and damn, the music is good, bitchin' really even it's just a tad too dated. But then a classic guitar riff never quite goes out of style does it? And I'd forgotten how good the bass lines are on his songs as well, pretty funky really considering it's classic hippie rock-n-roll.