My Bag

That photo is by far and away the most popular photo on my flickr page. That's a picture of the contents of my bag, taken when I was living in Tokyo. It's been viewed about a hundred and fifty times.

Here's what I wrote about it when I posted it to flickr:

Inspired by a flickr call to post the contents of your bag, here are the contents of ONE of my bags--just the everyday bag, not the work or gym bag. There's my pass case (with three different passes: a SUICA pass for JR trains, a commuter pass to get from Higashi- Mukojima to Ginza on The Kaisha's dime, and a Passnet card for all non-JR/non-work travel), my two gaijin cards (the "lost" card and it's replacement), assorted pens and pencils, makeup and makeup bag, MINTIA mints, a lighter, benadryl-type medication, my iPod, my keitai (cell phone, with a message from Zander to come to Akihabara for a party) with its attached Totoro charm, three bottles of contact lens stuff, a feather from Hiroshima, and about ten-thousand yen in assorted bills and coin.

What makes peeking into someone else's handbag (or medicine cabinet or refrigerator) so appealing?

Here is a picture I took last night:



That's the content of the bag I carry now. It seems like so much less to me. Partly that's because I don't wear makeup anymore, and, as I'm not teaching, I don't carry around the zillions of pens and markers that I always needed at work.

Here are a few closeup views of what I do carry around:



From left to right is a blank red book from Muji (?) given to me by Kelly First. I use it to keep lists of things that I need to do or stuff I have to acquire. The blue and purple book is an address book that I bought after I lost my last phone. (It turns out that the phone knew all the phone numbers and I knew none, so when I lost the phone, I knew nothing.) The last book is a little blank book that I bought just a couple of days ago at Cost Plus. It was an impulse buy at the register and so far I have written nothing in it.



There's the book I'm carrying around now, the copy of Peter Pan that I mentioned yesterday. (Funny this, someone left a comment on yesterday's post expressing surprise that I found Barrie's book so saccharinely sweet. I followed the link from the comment to a site by someone who apparently wrote a book using Barrie's characters. Here's the part where I don't say anything at all about that--because I definitely can't say anything nice.) I tucked my workout plan, formulated by Dorine the fabulous trainer, into the Barrie book.



This is my little allergy-paranoia stash. Yes, those are two epi pens. Yes, that is some crazy strong insect repellent. Yes, that is a little pile of Benadryl. (Did you know that two Benadryl are the approximate equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine? That knowledge has come in very handy for me, a non-drinker, on many an afternoon over the last five years or so.)



Here is my fugly cell phone. (I made it fugly on purpose after the last cell phone went missing and one of the people at the cell phone company told me that lost cell phones are often not returned because another cell phone company buys "used" cell phones from any Tom, Dick, or Harry that walks in off the street. Apparently they pay about $30 per phone and wipe the memory and resell it. Fuckers. So the phone you paid $100 plus for? Nets some thief a cool $30--but it nets another cell phone company even more. So, yeah, I made my cell phone fugly by gluing cheap rhinestones to it. My idea was that even if I lost it, no one's going to give a thief $30 for such a fugly little thing.) There's a cell phone has a charm on it, too, a little Cinnamaroll charm. (You can't see it in my photo, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it's really, really cute.)

There's also some change that I found floating around in the bottom of my bag. And that final thing on the right is a pocket worm. A what? A pocket worm. That little worm was a Christmas gift from one of my friends in Japan named Kazuko. At Christmas, she gave each person their own little pocket worm, handmade by a friend of hers. Each little worm carried something or was doing something that expressed the recipient's personality. Because I liked to go to the gym, my little pocket worm is lifting barbells. The little worm slips into its little brown cocoon for safe keeping, by the way.

Hmmm. I thought I had left behind most of my Japanese things, but now that I look, my bag is full of reminders. There's the Muji notebook and the Cinnamaroll (a Japanese character) charm (that I bought here in the US from a Japanese exchange student). There's my little pocket worm from Kazuko. And I don't have a closeup of it, but my wallet is also from Japan. It was a going-away gift from a student. (Remind me to tell you about her someday. She was a very, very rich middle-aged woman who, in lieu of her regular lesson, talked the manager into letting me go out drinking with her in the middle of my last day at The Kaisha.) Inside that wallet is a charm, a little frog charm, that I got from a temple in Tokyo. The word for frog in Japanese is kaeru. Kaeru is also a verb. It means "to return," so people who are going away often get frog-themed gifts from people who want them to return.

So that's my bag.