Besides that one time in Secondary Three or Four when I completed the 2.4-kilometre run in nine minutes and some seconds, I’ve never been a sporty one. But I was passed this baton, so now I must take it and dash. And dash I will, even in heels.

Total number of shoes you own
Well, it’s hard to say. I’m sort of in transit these days, so I don’t have the collection with me. But let’s start with the ones that are in my immediate city.

The Singapore count is four pairs: new emergency purple heels; two pairs of cloth kungfu shoes from New York’s Chinatown, five dollar each, in red and orange; and gym shoes, for the gym.

The Sydney count is two pairs: pink suede ballet flats and red Converse sneakers. Okay, sure, technically, these shoes are currently in Singapore with me. But they were the designated Sydney winter shoes, and will not be worn till me and my feet get to Sydney this weekend.

The Brooklyn count is also known as the London count, and this one is difficult, because I packed up the boxes weeks ago, and now who knows what’s in them. I remember a pair of pink rubber rain boots; a pair of pointy-toed red leather kitten heels; a pair of tacky-glam gold strappy heels that made Ren suggest she must be touched in the head to still be friends with me; black faux-crocodile wedge heels, sexy as all hell; two pairs of well-worn twenties-flapper-style Aerosoles heels in pink and in black that make people stop me in the street to ask where I got them, and then to repeat, in amazement, “Aerosoles?!”; Las Vegas cowboy boots that will make you fall over in wonderment; and a pair of Eley Kishimoto sneakers in orange and blue.

The story with the Eley Kishimoto sneakers is that two summers ago I went to Hvar to visit my friend Amy, and she’d e-mailed to say I should bring a pair of sneakers. So I showed up in these, and she rolled her eyes and said, with some disdain, “New York.” Apparently by “sneakers,” she’d meant, like, Nike or Reebok or something, something in which to traverse the rocky landscape of Dalmatia. But the thing is, even in fashion sneaks, I can navigate like a mountain goat, and, anyway, I wasn’t showing up in Hvar to abseil, especially not when there was a gelato joint right by the harbour.

The story with the gelato joint is that one of the flavours was Kinderyaye. That means Kinder Egg. That means yum.

The story with Amy is that she is a nice Singaporean girl who met a boy while on vacation in Croatia. After maybe a couple of years of e-mails, she decided to quit her teaching job where the kids called her “’Cher”—this is pronounced as if it is short for “teacher,” because it is, not as if Amy is a big-haired pop diva who has had some number of her ribs surgically removed—she decided to quit her job and move to Hvar to hang out with the boy. Today they sell pretty sachets of homegrown lavender and bottles of olive oil, while the German tourists drink wine-and-Cokes in the town plaza, and the Adriatic Sea lap-lap-laps on the beaches of smooth white pebbles.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Tym, you see how I couldn’t get this assignment done any earlier.

So. The global count is fourteen, which seems to me a number I need not be ashamed of.

Oh, and I have just now remembered a pair of Peranakan beaded slippers that my grandmother sewed for me, which I’ve never worn out, because they don’t go with anything. I mean, they’re beautiful and all, they just don’t go with anything. The day I wear a sarong kebaya, I’ll give those shoes a call. (I have their number.) But, so, they’re here now, and they will hang out here for a little bit, posterity-like, till I figure out how to work them into my wardrobe.

Hence: fifteen pairs, one of which, let’s just say, is heritage-protected.

Number of empty shoe boxes you cleared out while counting up the tally
Jilo. I don’t do shoe boxes. I do white shelves lined with brown parcel-wrapping paper.

Most expensive pair of shoes
Probably the cowboy boots, which cost two hundred and something American dollars, which is possibly the most I’ve ever spent on an article of clothing. But you can’t trust my memory on this one. My mind has a tendency to block out large sums of cash.

Cheapest pair of shoes
Fi’ dollar fi’ dollar kungfu shoes, we loooove Chinatown.

Brands of shoes represented in your collection
Kenneth Cole. Hush Puppies. Eley Kishimoto. The Old Gringo. Aerosoles. On Pedder. Old Navy. New Balance. Made in China.

The last shoe you bought
Purple emergency heels! Purple emergency heels! And I’d even announced at the get-go that I needed to find a pair of emergency replacement heels, which is generally not the best way to go about a shopping expedition, because then you are sure to come away with, like, a spatula, a Japanese animated character to hang off your cellphone, a char siew bo lo bun, and maybe some apple candy, and NO SHOES. But the gods were with us, and I even had to choose between two pairs. Okay, fine, they were the same shoe, one in purple, one in gold. But a choice had to be made nonetheless.

How many shoes you have under your work desk
Hello, what? And I’m not just saying this because I don’t have a job. Even when I did have a job, there were no stray shoes lurking under the desk. Um. I will admit that said job was at an indie press where the dress code was such that, one day, our boss said to one of the editors, with no malice at all, “The bank is coming by tomorrow to talk about the loan, so would you mind putting on some shoes for the meeting?”

No, but, really. Spare shoes, for what?

Five people I'm passing this baton to
Bowb—Everything should be right in front of you ’cause you’re unpacking, no? Hngh!

BBRUG—Hello, my pink-sandaled friend.

Hector—Hé mec, on veut savoir si t’as des fashion-shoes aussi roses et aussi pooklet que ton blog !

Jeff—Since you actually have a whole shoe theory and all...

Saffron—Do you like shoes like you like fooding? What do your feet wear when you don’t have any raspberry coulis to distract from the sneakers?

Done, and done.

Now, can we talk about how many mosquito bites I have? I would like to take this opportunity to volunteer that I have one rather near my bum.