File under bag lady

Dear Marc, you're a famous bag gentleman, and rightly so. Your bags are more attractive than most people I know, including one that stares back at me each morning in the bathroom. I'm a bag lady myself. I have bags. Two, to be exact, placed under my eyes.

Other than that, I kind of grab things and stuff them in plastic bags before I leave the house. I'm a freelancing copywriter, and I'm kind of small. I carry the plastic bags and my heavy laptop with me everywhere I go, pressing my bagfree shoulder up to my ear to talk on the phone. This S-shaped posture is common in the freelance crowd. But pretty it's not, and I'm afraid it may become a permanent body pattern.

A walking S, weighed down by the burden of plastic bags. That is not how I intended my professional look to look. Russel & Hazel read my mind and created the oh so pretty Audrey line.

























Finally! I thought, thinking of how neatly all my presentations, invoices and briefs would fit into the slick and highly professional five file tote.

But then I wondered where I would put my emergency banana for those blood sugar dips. Where does the iPod go? And the all too big, but immensely soft and comfortable headphones? Where should I put my modem, my hair brush and my extra sweater for the capricious Swedish weather? Is there a file slot for my sun glasses, my pens, my computer cord or the digital camera I must carry around (in case I find a great doll house, sawed in two)?

















Not to mention the novel I'm currently reading, the packet of tea or the box of chocolates I'm addicted to.

The expandable five file tote solves many problems but not all. I now understand why people drive cars. They don't need them for transportation. The cars are actually just very big bags.

I think you should invent a bag with built-in minimizer. A scientific miracle, the minimizer shrinks everything in a woman's bag to the size of jelly beans. How practical!

Until you do, I'll walk around with my plastic bags, severely s-shaped, but ready for anything.

Slouchy greetings
-e