12 March 1999: Wallet

Rob of Kalamazoo Days poses the occasional question to us, his discriminating readers. Most recently, the question is "Open your wallet or purse and describe what's in it. What do you think these things might tell us about you?"

My answer was longer than I figure was warranted, and where do I dump extraneous detail but here? The bit in blue is the part I sent to Rob.

My wallet gets to be a purse, since I'm a chick. And my purse is the outside comparment of my backpack, since I'm that kind of chick. And that holds

• a pack of cherry lifesavers (with seven left),
• a bottle of Refresh Tears (a full ounce, which strikes me as a huge bottle of this sort of thing but everything sold at the warehouse is supersized)
• an Oral-B toothbrush in a purple plastic traveling case,
• the green barrel of a Pilot BP-S pen with a purple medium-point refill and all the silver worn off the embossed letters,
• a coated black hair elastic,
• an almost-empty .85 oz tube of Crest,
• in a clear pocket, my Eco-Pass (economically and ecologically sound, a marriage of employer and bus company, by which I pay less in a year of hassle-free commuting that many in Denver pay a month to park, with a photograph of me for which I must have jutted out my chin because my eyes are tiny and my grin huge, like a carnival mirror photograph), and
• my wallet

In pockets of unusual size,

• a checkbook (the plainest available, but not the cheapest since it has that NCR layer) with three checks left, and behind it, my glasses prescription (in case I ever lose my glasses, I can hold the paper over my eyes, I guess),
• five uni-ball Vision pens (in blue, green, pink, red, and purple, kept there instead of at work (where I edit with them) because the backpack has little pen holders that would look messy if left empty and pens, good or bad, disappear from work),
• a floppy disk, and
• my glasses case (empty, this being a weekend, thus no contacts yet, morning)

Attached to their clip,

• my keys (apartment, work, car, bike, mail, suitcase, my mother's house [2200 miles away--go figure], and Michigan J. Frog tipping his top hat)

In a zippered pouch, with an extra suitcase key ringed to the zipper tab,

• three OBs (regular),
• an emergency contacts case (also empty, since my contacts are in the medicine cabinet where they belong),
• a little tub of Clinique Moisture on Call, and
• a 10 ml. bottle of antihistamine drops for my eyes (to prevent whatever prevented me from wearing contacts for 15 long ugly months from recurring)

In a flat pocket behind a little partition,

• extra blank pages for my DayRunner and
• a comb

My wallet is green supposed leather, allegedly a Liz Claiborne but because I bought it at Ross for I think $10, I suspect it's a forgery. It's standing to the left of the monitor now, balancing on its three sides (it has two folds). The left and middle part has two slots sized for dollar bills and card-sized slots under those; the right part is just a flap with a clear slot on its underside.

Under the flap lives my driver's license, or as the state of Colorado calls it, Driver License Adult. It expires on my birthday next year, has a picture I like, and classifies me thus: Sex F, Ht 5'06", Wt 1X0 [sic--that is, my transcription is thus if the card is not], Hair BRO, Eyes HAZ, Donor Y, Voter Y, Class R (for restricted vision).)

The upper bill pocket has a $20 bill (fresh from the ATM, with the new look) and the bottom one holds receipts and movie stubs, all which I just removed (I need to do Quicken, and I saw La Vita E Bella, A Simple Plan, and Elizabeth).

The little card slots hold all the cards on their right sides, convenient for right-handed people like me. Closest to the flap, on top when the wallet's on its back in my hand, in the best location as it were, is my library card (with four extra bar codes obscuring its face--Denver County plus two other counties in the metropolitan area (Arapahoe and Douglas) and Pitkin (Aspen) and Estes Park (near Rocky Mountain National Park). Then a credit card (my sole one) with a hologram of a dove on it, a debit card, then the fold, and in the left bank of slots, my HMO id, a student id from DU (legally--I'm a faculty spouse--and whose photo shows me looking distinctly strained, since I showed up at the office two minutes before it closed), and a CostCo membership (with a black and white photo that could be anyone). There's a zip coin pocket on the back of the middle section, containing 61¢ in the fewest possible coins--no, two quarters instead of a half dollar). In the not-really-a-pocket under the card slots, my red cross donor certificate (B+ [my grade point average, I like to say], 2 gallons 6 pints donated) and my museum membership card (expires 2/00).

What does it say about me? That I bothered to list everything indicates to me that I like to catalog things, which I knew. Instead of a laundry list, I tried for a worthwhile detail, because I'm reading Writing Down the Bones. I also wrote about where the wallet generally lives, which I deleted since it violated the criterion. Actually I just cut it from my email, but it's going to be a journal entry, because I tend toward excessive, unnecessary detail that I strongly suspect appeals to no one but myself.

I always carry my backpack with that outside compartment. Its main compartment contains, at a minimum, my current paper journal, a couple of books, and my DayRunner. The journal is a purple Mead 3-subject, 138 sheets, called "graduate lined"; the books are (now) J.M. Coetzee Waiting for the Barbarians and Kobo Abe Kangaroo Notebook; in addition to the regular calendar type pages, the DayRunner holds the photographs other people might carry in their wallet, a couple of Blake's feathers, another green-barrelled purple pen, and postage stamps. I have H rate stamps for when I eventually write the last three letters for which I have 32¢ stamps, three 1¢ stamps, and two packs of 20¢ stamps for those moving postcards I'm going to send out Real Soon Now to all those vital folk in my life who don't have email. Also in the backpack are a New Yorker, a postcard with the name of the oral surgeon my DMO just deigned to send me about hacking out my lower wisdom teeth, and a laughably slanted magazine called Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets (March 1999). This last I borrowed from Dot Org's library because I figured it'd be good for a guffaw. If its title hadn't convinced me it was Objectivist, the full-page advertisement for an Objectivism: Theory and Practice seminar in Burlington, Vermont this summer, might have clued me in. Scattered and tattered at the bottom lie a couple of automatic deposit paystubs, which I've just put with the receipts I cleared out of my wallet. Plus All the Pretty Horses, which I recently lent to someone I work with and have now returned to the shelf between The Razor's Edge and The Crossing. Four packs of the less-favored flavors of lifesavers (five basic and sour berries) from the Christmas book my sister just gave me (yes, in March), which I plan to leave in the lunchroom at Dot Org (where I got the New Yorker) and some stocking stuffer toys I'm going to send to HEBD, since her daughter will probably enjoy them more than they would enjoy being forgotten behind a shelf of books. Aha! and a paperclip.

Thanks Rob! I just balanced the account, shelved a book, tidied up, and reminded myself to send the toys and call the dreaded surgeon.