my recruit, my shoes

hello my peeps,
yes i have been gone for a while for various reasons which include but are not limited to food poisoning and recruitment weekend. Yes, it was the weekend that lets you really think about your life as you have to convince someone else to give up their early 20's and come to michigan so they too can become miserable and boring. Well all the free food was what got me the food poisoning. It was some kind of garlic induced thing i think. But my recruit was hella cool and we watched ace of cakes together and random travel channel shows. She felt that we would have made great college roomates and i informed her that unlike all of my college roomates i didn't hate her so yes, we would have been great roommates.

well one funny story. Let me preface this with some info. I came from a household where taking your shoes off in our house was considered a great insult and caused such angry comments from my father as "who does he think he is! he doesnt' even know us! This is our HOUSE and here they are taking off their shoes!" yes, my father is wierd but anyways whenever i have to go to someone's house (namely asian people) and take off my shoes i always feel this wierd sense of discomfort because taking of your shoes is really intimate. i know i know, it's wierd. Anyways we have this fancy dinner at a professor's house last night and i show up early with my recruit because i'm on set up committee. So all is fine, he has his shoes on, we have our shoes on. I mean this is a professional event! So anywyas a few other people show up shoes entact. Then a large group of about 6 Asians walk in the door and proceed to remove their shoes and leave them in the corner hallway. From this point on everyone that walked into the house (about 60 more people) saw the pile of shoes on the side of the door and thought "oh i guess i have to take my shoes off). Soon the party was full of people in their socks and some even barefoot! good god people, this is a departmental affair at a tenured professor's house. So i go up to the prof and i'm like "fred, you don't care that i have my shoes on right? because i notced all the shoes at the front of the door and i was wondering if i was supposed to take mine off." His response: "WE are not a shoe taking off family so i have no idea how that happened or why people keep taking off their shoes. please leave them on." And we both laughed. I didn't want to tell him that it was the posse of asian students that had come in. So anyways all the 60 pairs of shoes ended up blocking the walkway between the living room and the door and just looked really gross and dirty. Like seriously, there is a time and place for shoe removal. Is this not america!