I am possibly the only girl you will ever meet who carries around a men’s wallet in her back pocket. It is far larger than any I should ever need and hardly fits. My wallet holds everything but money. It holds my identity, in convenient card form, and my memory, written out on notes. It holds coupons I will never use and beaten pieces of paper, receipts gone through the wash. My family, my friends are in my wallet, folded into 2.5” x 3”. Phone numbers, addresses, names.
My laptop is a ten pound cell phone, if nothing else. I type rather than talk, and it seems to work out well enough; there are no awkward silences between computers. It, too, is beyond what I need; like my wallet, my laptop is unconventionally large, a mark of how spoiled I truly am, a testament to my mother’s financial genius. My sister, age three, used to practice shooting spit wads at the screen.
A sketchbook holds my progress over two years; I’ve barely gotten past the halfway point. My drawings are supplemented with contributions from other people: my sister’s first attempt at “A,” her scribbles, circles, and what she said was a whale. My cousin’s alphabet and her impression of some Disney princess. My best friend’s page, marked boldly with her name, her drawing erased over and over again, and still unfinished.
I tote a solitary binder, filled with paper. Blank sheets, lined sheets, even two different types of graph paper (ones with holes, ones without). The graph paper is from years ago; I tend to be minimalistic with nearly everything, yet I carry things I only pretend to use. I have highlighters, inking pens, and a PDA. The inking pens are from before the days of Photoshop (at least, the days before I got a tablet). The highlighters are for supposedly picking out the important parts in a book, but I don’t like to color a colorless book.
I have headphones, for drowning out the sounds of a horrible guitarist not so far away. My laptop converts to a CD player, often with the help of AOL’s collection of music videos and MSN’s news clips.
I keep my keys in my front pocket, where I can hear them ring when I walk. I’m told I’ll have to pay some ungodly amount of money if I ever lose them, and how unfortunate would that be?
I have pens, pencils, and a calculator. I have cords and cables, from black to neurotic blue. I have empty pockets and lead refills. I have senior pictures from a year back; five from three people and forty-five of my own. (Ever the procrastinator, I had waited until October to take my pictures and March to pick them up.)