If someone could please explain to me my obsession with bags, I'd be most appreciative.

I love bags. Not just handbags but luggage, tote bags, messenger bags -- anything that enables me to carry along all the things I feel I may need in whatever situation I plan to be. I posted the other week about ordering a lumbar pack (click here to see the particular one I got. Mine is pink.) Well, it showed up this morning and I spent a good fifteen minutes checking it out, examining it, and, finally, experimentally putting various items in it to see if they fit and planning out exactly where everything would go when I actually use it. (Which, I should point out, is still TWO MONTHS off.)

It's an illness, I tell you.

The love of bags, for me, isn't even really about looks. I don't match them to my shoes or my outfits; I don't care about having designer ones, either. Sure, I want the ones I have to be attractive but it's more about function for me. You see, I'm unhealthily concerned with being prepared, at all times. I was a Boy Scout in a former life, I think. I would no more consider leaving the house (except to make a school run) without my purse full o' supplies than I would consider going out without clothing. You name an eventuality and I will probably have something in my purse to take care of it. The way I see it is, isn't it better to have, for example, plastic baggies in one's purse and not need them than to find oneself in a situation where it's just what you need but you don't have one?

It's not like I'm carrying around twelve pounds of lead buckshot or anything, either. All the things I pack along with me are small and lightweight. Take the drugs, for example. On any given day I have extra-strength Tylenol, Excedrin and Imodium AD in my purse, along with decongestant nasal spray. They take up very little room, weigh next to nothing, and, let's be honest here, would YOU want to find yourself in a situation where you could really, really use some Imodium AD and not be able to get any? I think not!

"So what does a weirdo like you do in the situations where toting an enormous handbag is not practical?" you may be asking. (Even if you weren't asking I'm going to tell you anyway.) Well, I do have the ability to scale down the production. Let's say we're going to be spending the day walking around some event. I have smaller purses of the type you can sling across your chest and one shoulder to be hands-free. Instead of an entire bottle of Tylenol, et. al., I take a few pills of each and put them in a baggie. I have travel brushes which fold up into almost nothing, rather than the full-sized brush I usually carry. I take a few pieces of gum out of the pack and take just those. You get the drift. This is what I will be doing with the lumbar pack when I use it at Abbey Road on the River. It also helps that the festival is on the actual grounds of the hotel, which means if I need something I don't have on hand it's just a matter of dashing up to the room to get it. Knowing that I have fairly easy access to the stuff I might need goes a long way toward making me less obsessive about having it on my actual person. It's just when I get in a place where I don't know what's available that I get a titch anxious.

I wonder what a psychologist would have to say about this particular hangup? I figure it must say something about me that one of the reasons I was so excited to get a conversion van was because it's got cupboards, honest-to-God cupboards in it, enabling me to really stock up on "may need" items for about any situation you could conjure. Perhaps it's my way of trying to bring order to chaos, which is a bit troubling. Either I'm neurotic, or I'm a Borg.