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We all have problems that we know, someday when courage permits, must be faced. Could today be the day that I am tough enough?<\/p>\n
Maybe I can\u2019t really do this myself. Should I summon professional help?<\/p>\n
It is time to excavate the interior of my purse.<\/p>\n
I mean, really. I\u2019m ordinarily not one to skirt issues. And yet day rolls into week morphs into month, and the cycle repeats, and I can\u2019t make myself do it. Until finally, when hoisting it to my shoulder prompts an objection from the shoulder\u2019s innermost being, I am finally forced to say to myself, What in the name of all that matters is IN this dadgum thing?<\/p>\n
Sometimes it helps to face truth by typing it out in front of you, so here is an (admittedly partial) list of what emerged when I shoved my paw nervously down toward the bottom and began heaving out.<\/p>\n
I could go on, but it would be too embarrassing. It\u2019s not that this problem has never been called to my attention in the past. Helping to unload my car when I arrived for a recent visit, my active and physically fit brother grabbed the handles of my purse and groaned when he hoisted it. The old joke that inevitably followed\u2014What do you have in here? All your money?\u2014clearly fell on deaf ears. Perhaps I didn\u2019t wish to note that all my money wouldn\u2019t weigh much, but that\u2019s a different tale.<\/p>\n
It might be reasonable to blame this problem on flawed fundamentals of Carry Strategy 1.0. This bag, by any standards, is large for a daily purse. In some restaurants, it needs its own seat. The thought process behind up-sizing went something like this: If I carry a \u201ctote\u201d-sized purse, it is big enough to insert a file, or an iPad, or even my laptop (see photo evidence), thus rendering unnecessary another bag, the cursed briefcase. All these things would be feasible if dimensions alone mattered. But you\u2019ve spotted the flaw here, right? These items rarely fit because there is too much other JUNK IN THERE.<\/p>\n
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Can the problem be blamed on a weakness for fashion? Maybe. A little. Big bags are in, or so it would appear on the streets, or in the elevators of our office building. And I must confess partiality to this particular bag, which has drawn the unsolicited admiration of more than one female under 40 in just the last week or two. What more does a female crave as style validation when she is, shall we leave it here, no longer 40?<\/p>\n
This problem weighed heavily, you might say, at the end of a recent weary day when I was followed into the elevator by another woman who looked, like me, so glad to be exiting the premises. Well, lookee there, I thought to myself as she struggled to free a hand to push the her floor button, she\u2019s carrying a tote AND a briefcase AND a lunch bag! My own burden could clearly be worse. Just before the door closed, a man jumped in and cheerily punched his own floor button, both hands fluttering free as two soaring birds. He was carrying: nothing.<\/p>\n
It was too intriguing to let this pass. Do you ever wonder, I said to my fellow Bag Lady, why we seem to always carry so much stuff?<\/p>\n
\u201cI KNOW,\u201d she lamented, with a tired sigh. \u201cI don\u2019t know why that happens.\u201d We both turned to the male before us, who instantly sensed his vulnerable state. \u201cHey, I don\u2019t carry things home because I try not to work on the weekends,\u201d he began, reinforcing his hands-free status by throwing both up in self-defense. \u201cAnd, I mean, I don\u2019t, well, I, just, well, I better not\u2026\u201d. The door opened at his floor, and he vanished.<\/p>\n
Bag Lady and I sighed, with no further words exchanged. We both got off at the next floor, shouldered our burdens with difficulty, and strode out to carry on.<\/p>\n
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We all have problems that we know, someday when courage permits, must be faced. Could today be the day that I am tough enough? Maybe I can\u2019t really do this myself. Should I summon professional help? It is time to excavate the interior of my purse. I mean, really. I\u2019m ordinarily not one to skirt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humor","category-mid-life-adventures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}