What's in that purse?

A few months ago, I bought a new purse. The price was right ($20), the purse was cute (turquoise!), and my old one was dirty and fraying. I love this new purse. It's kind of like Mary Poppins' carpet bag -- seemingly bottomless. It's that capacity for carrying everything that is the purse's one drawback. Carting around a bunch of stuff can get heavy. Yesterday when I picked it up, I thought "No wonder my arm is all jacked up."

How heavy is heavy? I took the purse upstairs and set it on the bathroom scale. It weighed nearly 6 pounds! Truthfully, I expected it to be more than that. But still, 6 pounds is the size of some newborn humans.

So exactly what is in a purse that weighs 6 pounds? This:

• 1 box of generic allergy medicine
• 2 bottles of ibuprofen (the shoulder, you know)
• 2 different kinds of lip gloss
• Foundation (ironic, because I rarely wear makeup)
• Blush
• A broken mechanical pencil
• Lip balm, free from a exhibit booth at a trade show
• Binder clip (to pull back my hair)
• A Diet Coke cap waiting for me to enter the code for Coke Rewards (drunk by someone else)
• Wallet (sadly, the emptiest of all)
• Pool key
• 3 maxi pads
• 1 pack of Splenda
• 1 pack of Pure Via
• Acne medication samples
• Sunglasses
• 2 hardback books -- one biography and one daily inspirations
• 35 cents in loose change
• A pen that I told the kids absolutely must not leave the kitchen calendar area
• An envelope of coupons
• Random register coupons from Target and Walgreens
• 2 expired Walgreens monthly savings booklets
• Numerous old receipts that just got shoved in the purse as soon as the cashier handed them over
• Bag of box tops someone at the office gave me to turn into school
• A ticket I saved from Annie's last show
• An Rx for bloodwork

So, what's in YOUR purse?

10 steps to becoming a hoarder

1. Early in your married life, take organizational tips from your mother-in-law (RIP), such as "pile stuff in laundry baskets to deal with it later."
2. Start a scrapbooking habit, take zillions of pictures, then fall desperately behind in scrapbooking for, say, 7 years. Put all the unscrapped photos into laundry baskets. Pile scrapbooking tools into a corner nearby.
3. Move on to stamping and create a smaller, though similar collection of rubber stamps, inks, paper.
4. Inspect bags your husband is hauling up from the toy room to take to Goodwill. Remove 40% of what he attempted to giveaway. You're saving the toys for the grandchildren (who might be born in 15 years or so).
5. Don't have the heart to decline anything offered to you by your husband's 92-year-old grandmother, even if you really don't need a battery-operated talking parrot, 3 Clinique giveaway bags or a yellowed U.S. map mounted on plywood. You don't want to hurt the woman's feelings. 
6. Marry a man who cannot part with anything that has to do with Star Trek or Star Wars.
7. Ask your children "do you want this?" before you throw anything away. 
8. Be sentimental enough to want to keep a newborn-size diaper (unused, of course), the hospital wristband your daughter wore when she had her tonsils removed, and the first letter your son wrote to Santa, plus about 17,000 other small pieces of their childhoods.
9. Maintain enough optimism to truly believe that you will fit into those clothes or they will come back into style someday.
10. When you finally decide to get rid of stuff, waffle back and forth between giving it away, throwing it away, saving it for someone else you know who might want it, or trying to sell it on Ebay. Put stuff in laundry baskets until you can make up your mind.