Welp, after eight/nine years of servitude (a third of my life by this point!), I've finally retired my shoes for a new pair. Although it took us almost three hours to find a place that had shoes available in my size. It turns out my feet are wider than I thought, a 4E, and that I wear a size eleven rather than a twelve (which my old ones were, but, by chance, while they weren't as wide as they needed to be, the extra size made up for it enough).
While the shoes I got aren't exactly my style (far from it), it came down to the fact that, if I had continued to be picky, after how troublesome it seemed to be to find a shoe in my size, it'd just end up being more expensive having a shoe of the style that I liked being customized to fit.
It's probably just me, but shoe styles aren't impressive to me. Though I assume that most people, when looking for something to wear, try to find something that says "me." I've literally looked through more than a thousand different shoes these past few weeks, and only this one pair said "me." Although I don't know if that makes me unique, very narrow-minded, or both. But the design is pretty simple, especially compared to most of the sneakers that I've seen lately, and the colors were a mix of subtlety and showiness that I liked. And they would have gone well with the colors of my small wardrobe (if you can call two pants and six shirts a wardrobe), besides.
But, eh. I had to settle for plain white. And nothing but white. White, white, white. Like they were dunked in a can of white paint. Good, I suppose, for when you're walking around at night... Which I rarely do, but still. Maybe I'll help a plane land one day, when the runway lights aren't working.