Like many women I know, I have a vast array of shoes. Unlike clothing, shoes, for the most part, continue to fit whether you gain or lose weight, so they are the bright spot in a sometimes cruel and taunting closet. For this reason, women take their shoes very seriously and many will spend quite some time organizing their shoes by height, color or occasion. Personally, I organize mine by the amount of time I can spend in them before my feet fall off.

Take, for example, my regular everyday boots, which I call my 10-hour shoes. I can wear these all day without a problem as long as I get some breaks in between and am not scaling Mt. Everest.

Then I have my three-to-five-hour shoes. These are generally for one occasion out with minimal walking involved. I call them my three-to-five-hour shoes because they are really good until that three-hour mark but can suddenly, without warning, turn on me between the fourth and fifth hour and become merciless instruments of podiatric torture.

My one-hour shoes are generally for sitting and the occasional posing so people can admire them before I sit again. There is really no walking involved in these shoes, except maybe to the bathroom, and even then, I will endeavor to hold it in rather than have to teeter my way across the room to go and use up even seven minutes of my precious 60-minute time limit.

Then there are my five-minute shoes. Why, you might ask, would someone buy shoes they can only wear for five minutes? If you're a woman, you probably don't need to ask this. But for the rest of the population, five-minute shoes can best be described as those unbelievably gorgeous and obscenely expensive shoes you had to buy because they winked at you seductively from the store window and just happen to go perfectly with a new party dress you just got. When you bought them at the store, you had no idea they were five-minute shoes because you only had them on for two or three minutes and were walking around on rugs with Tempur-Pedic cushioning (they plan it that way) so that you couldn't really know how they would feel in the real world. But then you wear them with your new party dress, go to an event and discover after five minutes that they are so incredibly painful to actually wear, you immediately become crippled and will need to be rescued by a llama — standing by in case of emergency — who will carry you around the event for the rest of the night while he spits on the other guests.

Most shoe store salespeople will not tell you that you are looking at five-minute shoes. They show you the fine workmanship and tell you how great they make your feet look and complement your calves. So there you are, strutting around the shoe store in your slinky shoes and your sweatpants hiked up over your knees like you are the queen of some fancy Pilates class, while a good-looking salesguy who looks at ugly feet all day tells you they make your legs look great. What the heck are you supposed to do? Of course you buy them, wear them to some fancy event, and the next thing you know, you are riding around on a rescue llama.

Fortunately for me, I have fine-tuned my five-minute shoe radar and rarely fall prey to the seduction of the killer shoe. But when I do, I know I always have my 24-hour pink fuzzy slippers to fall back on.

Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.

Photo credit: Jaclyn Moy at Unsplash