My Purse, My Suitcase

I’m generally a clean, fairly organized person. I make my bed every day, my sink is generally void of dirty dishes, my DVDs are neatly stacked, and the coffee grounds are washed out of the coffee maker every morning. In a normal world, this would indicate that nearly every aspect of my life is clean, organized, and void of clutter/junk-free.

Until you looked at my purse.

Now, I, like most other women, hate carrying a large bag, because the bigger it is, the more you can fit in it, and then logically, the heavier it is. How on God’s green, magnificent Earth I manage to get some of the stuff in there I haven’t a clue, but somehow it always does. And the sad thing is, I actually use most of these items, on a weekly, if not daily, basis. I can’t even imagine the horror that my purse is going to be once I have kids and a husband someday.

Here are a few things that I usually have in my purse at any given moment:

-- My wallet, weighted down with coins and old Fred Meyer and Target receipts (not to be confused with the random change and Fred Meyer and Target receipts wandering around the inside of my purse)
-- Bobby pins, taken out of my hair from the day before, because frankly I didn’t like that style anymore.
-- A padlock, to be kept on my locker at the gym. It would never occur to me to leave it at the gym. That would just be too logical.
-- Earrings, worn the day, week, or month before that I have worn sometime in the recent past, that usually I spend about 10 minutes looking for the day I want to wear them, only to realize that I left them in a purse, gym bag, my car, etc.
-- A wide variety of Trident or Orbit gum wrappers, some with old gum inside them (like you don’t have that in your purse or random pocket, either?)
-- My camera. You never know when you’re going to come across the perfect sunset, the perfect pair of shoes you need some helpful input on, or a fender-bender in need of some concrete documentation.
-- Sunglasses. I’m forever squinting in the sunlight….or even when it’s not that bright outside.
-- iPod. Because nowadays, it’s just what you do.
-- Flash drive. It’s come in handy fairly often. Most recently to transfer my copy of Midnight Sun onto my computer from my old job.
-- Lip gloss. You name it, I got it. My current favorite is my old standby of Vanilla-Mint Chapstick, closely followed by Bath&BodyWorks’ Vanilla Soda Fountain lip shine. It’s sticky, but it works like a dream. You can bet it’ll be present at my sister’s wedding on Saturday.

Ten years (or more) down the road, I’m sure that I’ll hear the phrase, “Mom, your purse is HEAVY!!!” and be brought back to those young years when I said the same thing to my mom. Who, I’m still convinced, insisted on packing along bricks in her purse for whatever shopping trip we were on. Because you just never know when something like that will come in handy.