Big City Wonder: Cindy

Try to cram your whole hand into a small jar of cherries. After you've got as much of your hand in that jar as you possibly can, do the same with the other hand, with another jar. Go ahead and remember your gymnastics lessons from when you were 8 years old, because you're going to need them. Now balance in those two tiny cherry jars and walk on your hands around a big city for the next 9 hours.

While nothing might seem so awkward and painful as doing what was just described, you may have seen a close second. Cindy is a sadly inappropriate match for the current, incredibly senseless (and extremely ugly, in many people's opinion) fashion trend of wearing impossibly pointy and uncomfortable spike heels with faded, often ripped jeans and other unlikely casual clothing. The net effect of this maddening garment juxtaposition is one that renders an entire outfit uncomfortable by the simple fact that one's feet are being strangled like a handful of sausages.

Cindy was a cheerleader in high school, but since she graduated from tech school ten years ago and has been living by herself in the best neighborhood her bachelorette income can afford within 10 miles of her tiny advertising firm in northeast Chicago, she has let fitness slowly slip away from her. The daily 10-minute tug-and-wiggle into her jeans has become a 15-minute yank-and-screech. Her bleach-damaged hair resists her persistent efforts to casually add volume with a nonchalant flip of her hand, resembling more of a straw cellar door being forced open and falling shut, pivoting on a dark-roots hinge.

She uncomfortably glares at her tired reflection in dark window of the commuter train, and then despondently at her naked left ring finger. She diffidently peers at the man with the shiny head and blue shirt, with his wide eyes glaring at the emergency exit sign at the end of the train and jaw grinding with what looks like focus or anger. She wonders if he notices how much her feet hurt.

He does.