I’ve always wanted to do one of those “what’s in my purse” posts, but 95% of the posts I’ve seen on other blogs are all Fendi clutches and eyebrow pencils and maybe, if the purse owner’s feeling extra-kooky, a few Hello Kitty bandaids, meanwhile –

CONFESSION –

I’m kind of a hoarder.

Like, the only reason I can’t say I’m surprised my apartment doesn’t have roaches is that I’m not totally sure it doesn’t have roaches.

Joke! That was almost definitely a joke! But when I change my sheets, I do always have to shake out the comforter for tape measures, screwdrivers, errant candle sconces, comic books about Freud, and at least half a dozen paperbacks. In my defense, when I was growing up, my mom had a refrigerator magnet that said: “Dull women keep immaculate houses.” Is it my fault I learned how to read before I understood the concept of hyperbole?

So, that said, the purse in question:

And what exactly is in said purse?

1. A dozen or so receipts, mostly for clothes and sushi, though there’s one from a fortune cookie factory. The earliest goes back to September 5, 2012, and is from my first proper date with my boyfriend, to the Japanese dollar store. 
2. A pamphlet explaining the history of the ghost pianist at the Magic Castle.
3. Car keys! Keys to: apartment, office, graduate student lounge, mailbox, old mailbox in Boston (whoops!), parents’ house, my sweet friggin’ ’04 Corolla; 8gig flashdrive filled to the brim with ’90s jamz.
4. Some sort of seedpod or husk. (???) Almost definitely something boyfriend picked up off the ground and handed to me.
5. Inside label ripped out of a pair of magic zebra gloves.
6. Wampum: a tiiiiiiny zipper pull, seashell, Trivial Pursuit pie wedge, bread twist tie I used as a ponytail holder the day after Thanksgiving (I had my reasons).
7. My well-camouflaged cell phone.
8. Former wallet that I apparently still carry around. Contents include: more receipts, various expired school and city library IDs, three and a half overcoat buttons, and subway cards from four major metropolitan areas.
9. Tampon.
10. New wallet! I like to think of it primarily as a sheath for my frequent-sushi-buyer rewards card, but my credit cards and stuff hang out there too.
11. I — I just have no idea.
12. ID badges and plastic clips.
13. Attempted list of 100 ideas for truth-or-dare-style drinking game challenges, to be attempted in a blanket fort. (I made it to 26. Yes, at least half of them involve singing and/or dancing.)
14. $11 in bills; $3.47 in small change (I scraped most of the gum off the pennies)
15. Accessory zone: one sparkly silver barrette from the Japanese dollar store; one cupcake barrette from Gymboree (my hair’s too thin for adult hair clips); handmade cupcake earrings I was suckered into buying to support Cystic Fibrosis research (awwww); gaudy-ass ring shaped like a tiger; Regal Beagle pin.
16. Fortune: “Yes, do it with confidence.”
17. Nicotine patch, electronic cigarette, four books of matches.
18. Set of magnetic screwdriver heads.
19. Ticket to the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
20. Black and orange permanent markers.
21. Bright orange 20-sided die I found in the laundry room and now use to make most of my spur-of-the-moment decisions.
22. My more interesting trash: Godiva chocolate wrapper, paper clip, yellow plastic Goodwill tag, cigarette butt (yikes)
23. Candy! More Godiva chocolate, two peppermints, and a bag of toffees made from the leaves of the coca plant (a souvenir from a colleague’s trip to … somewhere in South America)
24. Earbuds. Which have presumably broken in the hour since I took this picture because MY EARS ARE MADE OF MAGNETS AND WIRE CUTTERS.
25. Actual trash.

I’ve got to say, the contents of my purse really do tell you pretty much all you need to know about me. Or at least as much as any normal person could stand.

A brief, boring coda: My boyfriend asked me the other day why I was rebooting my blog (he was understandably anxious because I wrote so much about dating back in the day) and I told him I wanted to feel more joy; he asked what that entailed, what my project was, and it was difficult to explain that I don’t want to do anything differently, necessarily. But my last twelve months have been pretty lackluster because I’d grown deaf to myself, indifferent. I want to go on dates with myself and have inside jokes with myself and just, you know, hear my own clamor and cacophony. What’s the point of really and truly liking yourself if you don’t do a damn thing about it?

Anyway, after the pictures, I cleaned the hell out of my purse and Purelled until my fingerprints were rubbed away. The receipts are recycled and I put the change in my private-island-fund jar. But the Dungeons and Dragons die and blanket fort drinking dare list? Those I left, by jove. They know where they belong.

I celebrated my 24th birthday in New York City, with two of my best friends, and they decided to give me whatever sort of birthday I wished. I contemplated 24 in 24 (staying up all night, getting dangerous) or maybe an elaborate cultural treasure hunt through the city (live my own movie montage of NYC moments), but finally decided on something more achievable: 24 things I wished I could do every day.

Today I found that list for the first time in a few years:

1. Exercise
2. Hang with Muscles and Justice
3. Kickass brunch
4. Levain cookie
5. Belgian beer
6. Lie in a park
7. Be inspired by something made by artists
8. Call my mom
9. Elegant cocktail
10. Long walk
11. Eat somewhere I’ve only ever heard of
12. Take one great photo
13. Ice cream
14. Listen to Justice say something that only Justice could say
15. Sing
16. Learn a bit of cocktail-party knowledge
17. Something street related [I have zero idea what this means]
18. Gawk at something like a tourist, looking extremely uncool
19. Put a great song on a jukebox
20. Play a game of some sort
21. Ask a bartender to invent me a drink
22. Try a food I’ve never tasted before
23. Gaze. Yearningly.
24. Something incredibly dudely

Okay, obviously I couldn’t keep up all of the food-and-bev-related dreams every day without lopping twenty years off my life expectancy, but on the whole, not a bad list. I’d be a happy woman if I could do five or six of those things every day. It seems almost … achievable.

High five for a rare burst of prescient wisdom, Baby Kat!

So here’s the thing: every day when I sit down to write, I have to remind myself the simplest thing — you can just make shit up. In fact, you kind of have to. Some days, I’m good at this. On my best days, I’m too good at it: I finish my pages (prostitutes! cannibalism! puns! uncles!) and then keep making stuff up.

There’s an antique doll museum a few towns over? Nothing’s stopping me from driving there. The Japanese dollar store has highlighter-yellow nail polish on sale? There’s no ordinance against it. If I want to assemble a pop-up cabana in my office and sit cross-legged in there eating yogurt-covered pretzels and singing along to ’90s jams, this plan is within the realm of reason!

Other than those mandatory 40-60 working hours a week, you can invent any activity you can dream of! You never have to do the same thing twice, if you don’t want to! Exhausting, yes. But freeing.

So why do we do the same things so often? I watch the same shows on Hulu every Friday night. I go to the same sushi restaurant twice a week. I shop at the same Goodwill and Macy’s, occasionally trundle off to the same spot on the same beach, knock back beers with the same people in the same generic graduate student pub.

Why?

I love my life. I have a god-given vocation that brings me fierce satisfaction, teaching material I’m passionate about to students I genuinely love, live in a city that, if it’s not perfect, at least boasts luxurious meteorological conditions and cheap Vietnamese food.

But I always tell my creative writing students that the best critique a reader can give you of a story is: “I love it. I just want more.”

I love my life. I just want more.

Time to do some weird shit, color a little bit out of the lines. If the most I do is one unusual or new thing per day, however small, then I’ll be able to look back with satisfaction after time has passed and say, hey, some days absolutely sucked, some were so perfect they must have been found in nature, but at least they were all different.

Oh, a little of

and more than my fair share of

because if I’ve learned one thing, it’s

though let’s be real, I mostly

the stress of which made me

but I kept up my spirits with a lot of

and writing in places like

and wearing crazy shit like

so even when I had to

most days I still feel

Which is how my hair looks right now too ’cause mama’s got a novel to write — WHO HAS TIME FOR COIFFURE?

…that about sums it up, actually, right there.

The serious ones:

• Write at least 500 words per day, no matter how awful they are.
• Complete a working first draft of my novel-in-progress by mid-March so I can workshop the whole shebang in the spring.

The really serious ones:

• Wear more costumey clothing. (I’m super into neon + menswear right now.)
• Finally get kicked out of a goddamn bar.
• Record a novelty rap album (for my ears only).
• Become a mustard snob.
• Take a really amazing new facebook profile picture.
• Focus on joy, not productivity.

I’ve noticed that when my primary focus is joy, the rest seems to take care of itself. The past few New Years, I’ve spent cursing the year in my rearview mirror, but I’m excited about 2013. I want to get elbow-deep into it.

Check out Draw A Dinosaur Day, courtesy of the genius Todd Page. This event is officially Peewee Herman and Bloggess endorsed. I’m not even making that up. I don’t think I COULD make that up.

My submission this year:

Darlings! All is busy here — my last full day of work today; the apartment’s half-packed; little things have been pricking me to tears all over town. I’ve also been busily writing fiction.

If you’re inclined to check it out, I have a new piece of very short flash fiction called “A Place to Store the Teeth From Dreams,” up at The Dirty Napkin. Check it out here, if you’d care to!

It might remind you of, oh gosh, way back when I used to write interesting blog posts. Like a few weeks ago?

If you spend your day waiting for inspiration, you’ll spend your day waiting, period.

I’m notoriously difficult to shop for. Not that I don’t give people ideas when gift-giving times roll around. But the things I want aren’t usually the sort of thing you want to run out and get professionally wrapped.

“Hm, Christmas already, you say? Well, I lost my tweezers a few months ago, so I could use another pair. Um, I eat a lot of cereal. I’m running low on paper towels?”

I’m one of the most easily delighted human beings on the planet, and I try to be concretely aware of just exactly why I love the people I love, every day. So when it comes to tangible tokens of that love, I’m a “buy me what I need” kind of girl. My favorite presents ever? A tie between a luggage set my parents gave me when I turned eighteen (and still use to this day) and the pairs of Rainbow flipflops that my nearest and dearest seem to keep buying me as my old ones start to embarrass them in public.

HOWEVER! My twenty-fifth birthday is coming up on July 24, and this year I’ve thought of a sheer-decadence present that would please me more than anything I’ve wanted in my entire life. (Except my Creepy Crawlers set when I was eight. Thanks, mom and dad!)

And the best part: it’s completely free. No shipping costs or anything. Genius, right?

This birthday, I want everyone I love (or like or admire or have ever gotten ice cream with) to record a message from their Five-Years-From-Now Selves to Past Kat, telling me something that’s going on in the year 2016. I’ll listen to them once, on my birthday, then burn them all onto one audio track that I’ll send to a friend for safekeeping, to time capsule until my 30th birthday, when I’ll play them again for maximum hilarity slash poignance.

Doesn’t that sound fun?

“Dear Past Kat, today I hoverboarded to the galactic-store to buy rocket fuel and organic peanut butter. Everything’s fair trade now! It’s crazy! Come join us!”

“Dear Past Kat, I’ve got to admit, things have been a lot more efficient since the robots triumphed in the inevitable Cyborg v. Human Uprising of 2013. Plus, now I can legally marry my waffle-maker.”

“Dear Past Kat, man, get with the program. Nobody says ‘dude’ in 2016. We all call each other ‘brigadier.’ Briiiiiiiig.”

How fun would fifty or so messages of that be?! I might be getting a little choked up thinking about it. But am mostly grinning my biggest dinosaur-hunter grin, imagining all the brilliant, hilarious snapshots of my favorite people I’ll be able to carry with me from year to year.

It’s all of my favorite things: visions of the future from the past; unbridled youthful exuberance; a moderate vein of narcissism; something I will never have to pack up and move cross-country. In fact, this is what I want for every holiday ever, now. You’re welcome, everybody! I will never ask you to buy me tweezers again.

What would five-years-from-now you tell yourself on a milestone birthday? How crazy’s 2016 going to get, y’all?