Friday, October 15, 2010

New Shoes

Paolo Nutini's "New Shoes" is on the playlist for the place I work. There's something that has disturbed me about this song since the first time I heard it and it's this -

When I was in sixth grade for some reason it was very important for the boys to know whether we had gotten our periods yet or not. Looking back on this now, this strikes me as very creepy, and very much akin to that scene from The Departed where Jack Nicholson asks his future wife, but present jail bait if she's gotten her period yet. At the time it probably had less to do with sex and more to do with teasing and bothering the girls of my grade, but even with this rationalization in mind, it's still gross. I'm sorry, but menstruation is gross.

Now, the boys couldn't rightly just go up to a girl and ask if she had gotten her period yet, because what if a teacher were listening? They would get in trouble. So, they came up with a code phrase- "new shoes." They would go around and ask the girls if they got "new shoes." This was used both to answer the aforementioned question and also would be really funny if the girl had no idea what on earth the boy was talking about and was simply answering whether or not she, in fact, had new shoes, sparking riotous giggling on the behalf of the boy and sheer confusion from the girl.

So whenever I hear Paolo Nutini sing about how everything is fine when he puts his new shoes on, I giggle a little, because he just got his period.