Accessorizing Accessories

Bag vs. Purse.. what is the real difference anyway? Tote bag, hand bag, shoulder bag, messenger bag, pocket purse, coin purse, clutch .. and on and on. It seems sort of strange to me that the English language can manage to have countless words for a container used for carrying money and small personal items and never have bothered to come up with a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun.
Silly English language.

At different stages of my life, I've tried different types of bags.Way back when I was a kid, starting out at school, I had a backpack. I don't actually remember what type it was specifically, but I'm sure I loved it.

Part of the way though high school, I upgraded my backpack to a messenger bag and stuck with that style all the way up until I graduated from college. In high school and college I personalized my bag with patches of all sorts (sunflowers, Smurfs, Fraggles). Why bother with a girly purse that wouldn't fit my sketch books or latest read when a sturdy, over-the-shoulder bag did such a fine job? Plus, if you have just one, you never have to worry about whether it matches your shoes.. it's just Your Bag.

However, the drawback of only having one bag is that it gets a lot of wear and tear. Inevitably, after a enough tough love, even the best bags must be retired.

As it turned out, my trusty college bag died right about the time I graduated and was moving on from student life to the Real World. My patches found new life on a denim quilt and I found myself debating about jumping in fully to this "growing up" thing. After all, it was a time of great changes, why not make a few more?

However, as I contemplated things I observed that "grownups" working downtown did, I wasn't quite sure how much changing I actually wanted to do. From my observations, Grown-ups don't wear messenger bags, they have purses or briefcases, and only wear dark, grown-up colors.. and pumps.

(from: http://gnitiyyiting.blogspot.com/2008/08/photobucket_29.html)

Without question, I eschewed embracing the general color scheme; I like color too much to compromise THAT far. Also, I rejected the idea of wearing pumps, especially to walk to and from work; I don't wear painful shoes, you can't make me. However, after some deliberation, I decided to give purses a chance.

Wearing a purse turned out to me a little more complicated than I originally envisioned. Turns out it was a rather troublesome to find one I liked. And then, once I did find one, it always seemed to wear out in just a few months. Finally, after over a year of this eternal search for yet another purse to replace the last broken one, I returned to my roots and bought myself a solid, quality, bright red messenger bag. It rocks.

Wohoo!!

Then, recently, I've been thinking I should add some patches to dress it up a little.. I'm still deciding what exactly I should put on there.  But this last weekend this process was officially begun when I was given a little plush finch.. it's adorable:

and thus we have come full circle :)


"It's my turn to decide what being an adult means." -- my hubby