My feet are sore and my tongue is all weird.

PART ONE

The feet thing might be my fault. I hoard a certain model of Nike sneaker. It came out a couple of years ago, and I should’ve bought a million pairs. I should’ve known they’d be discontinued, because every sneaker and bra I love gets discontinued.

I wear both into the ground.

Till the Nikes have holes in the toe and barely-there rubber at the heel, and the bras have nylon hairs sprouting along the underwire.

The reason these Nikes are so special to me is the tongue. (God, there’s so much tongue in this post.)

Most sneaker tongues are too long and cut me off at the ankle in a way that gives me cankles.

It’s a tiny detail. You’d never think about your sneaker tongue, would you? Well, a regular one takes a good 3 inches off my legs visually. This particular Nike I like has a short tongue. It ends low on the ankle. So it looks good with shorts. If I’m wearing shorts, I need all the advantages I can get.

The last time my favorite short-tongued Nikes were at their sweet end, I decided to acquire and squire away as many of that edition as I could find.

Website after website, all that was left were size 5s.  But then, I found one site buried deep in google that had all different colors in my giant clown-shoe size.  Grey with Varsity Yellow. Blue with Hero Red! The choices!

Sure, the website was a little sketchy, with a URL named for the sneaker itself. Something like, nikefree5pointohplus4u dot com. But hey, buyer’s protection. I put in my credit card.

Box after slightly crushed, sloppily wrapped orange box started arriving from China.

They’re all the right colors.

But um. I held them up against my original pair. The grooves in the sole are in the wrong places. And they feel hard. After walking in them, putting on a certified real pair makes me feel like I’m stepping on pillows.

Yeah, they’re counterfeit.

(I think.) I’ve been wearing them anyway, because, again, I’m out of real ones. Also, I spent all this money on them! And what am I going to do, return them to China? The shipping. The trip to the post office. Forget it.

But now my feet are sore, I walk around the house like I have cuts on my feet, and I’ve got leg cramps.

PART TWO

As for the tongue thing…

Not the sneaker tongue, but my actual, mouth tongue.

Both my dentist and his hygienist told me not to bother with mouthwash. They shrugged like, it’s not gonna hurt you, but it’s for fools.

So I got some Crest Pro-Health. I was out of mouthwash, and I like mouthwash. (I’m always fighting plaque buildup.)

I usually use good ol’ Listerine, however to this major sucker, the Crest’s opaque white bottle made it look more secret-formula, clinically-proven-results-y.

It left a white film after rinsing with it, and I had to do an after-swish with water, but that’s what you do at the dentist, right?

And the stuff really cleaned my mouth!

Though I woke up next morning with a slight metallic taste, my teeth felt like I’d just had a professional cleaning.

I thought, wait till I tell my dentist how wrong he is.

He’s a friend, no way would he steer me away from something so effective just to make an extra buck off my tarnished teeth. He must not be up on the latest products. Why else would he hold out on me?

I decided I’d use the Crest Pro-Health every day and night till my next dentist appointment.

And then, ta-da, shock the hygienist with how little plaque scraping she had to do. One word: “Mouthwash,” I’d tell her. Except it’d come out like “mouwha” because her hands would be in my mouth.

But after the second night I used it, I woke up with that metallic taste even stronger.

And my tongue was all white. It felt slimy, like after you drink lemonade. Took my electric toothbrush to it. Gave it a miniature carpet cleaning. Made no difference.

Two days later, my husband picked out the wine for me and my friends at his restaurant. They said it was delicious. He looked at me and said, “What.”  I was making a face. I’m sure the wine was exquisite, but to me, it had a mouthfeel of gritty spinach and a finish of dirty penny.

I of course googled furiously, and found the following on the Crest Pro-Health website:

I haven’t used the mouthwash in 3 days. And today?

My food tastes like a set of iron hand weights that 30 other people have used in a step aerobics class at Lucille Roberts.

You may think that means I eat less. No, I eat 3 times more, trying to taste something.

That’s it. I’m not using any more products. And I really want to stop thinking about tongue.