I read an interesting opinions piece in today’s Globe and Mail that has inspired me to do my own version. I call it, “My life- it's in the bag.”

I have had many bags, or purses. I usually have one core bag that travels around with me everywhere I go until it breaks or gets stained or becomes not as useful as the new bag I see in the store window.
I have had the pleasure of carrying a beautiful blue silk bag with bamboo handles that fiancé’s mum brought back from Costa Rica. I have had a canvas bag with a French movie poster on it. I have had the large faux leather tote and most recently the red shoulder bag that I received on Valentine’s Day. Now, I am using a boho oversized slouch bag from Old Navy, though by its appearance I could get away with lying that I received it shipped over from a street vendor in Mumbai, India.
That’s what everyone sees and has seen, slung over my shoulder, squished in my elbow, and/or hanging desperately from a few fingers as I try to balance other things on my minimal number of limbs.
Inside, only very few have ventured. It holds the supplies that I have come to rely on as necessary components of a fully functioning me. There is always, ALWAYS lip gloss. The Lip Smackers kind, usually a strawberry or raspberry. Something reddish. I also have my reading glasses and sunglasses, each in their own case to protect them from my bag being squished, sat on or between two bus doors as they close. I always have my keys, and I applaud myself for never having lost them or forgotten them, leaving my stranded on my apartment steps, (knock on wood). I always have my cell phone, and no matter what kind of fancy cell phone compartment the bag has, I can never find the vibrating pink contraption until just when the ringing stops to tell me I have missed a call. I always have my agenda, because without a daily list of what’s going on, the ability to look ahead a few days and to record important dates, I would be lost. I have forgotten that from time to time, and I immediately resort to writing down everything I remember for that day on a loose piece of paper as a wannabe agenda stand-in.
Lately, I have taken to keeping a stick of deodorant in there. Not that I find myself an especially sweaty or smelly gal, but it just feels better to know that after walking on my lunch break in a shirt with especially tight armpits, I don’t have to sit near people I know smelling as bad as I think I might.
There are usually some hair elastics tossed inside, sometimes some bobby pins and maybe even a coloured Rimmel lip gloss. And I always take my iPod along, to add a pre-selected soundtrack to my carpe diem journey. It’s nice to feel like I’m in a movie sometimes.
If someone were to find my lost bag, should that horrible and dreadful occasion ever come to pass, I’m sure they’d peep inside and find it to be just what they expected of a twentysomething urbanite. Or if they happened to be a male, they might look in, not understand the contents as if they were words being spoken to him in another language, and ditch it. But it’s my bag, my saving grace, and now you know what’s in it.