What’s in My Bag?

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Yes, that’s my bag. Bet you wonder what’s in it, don’t you.

I’m a big-time magazine junkie. I’m guessing I get around 25 magazines in the mail each month. You can just imagine how much my postman loves me. There have been days when he has bypassed my mailbox and just left a big pile of stuff on the bench that sits outside my front door. I don’t blame him.

I’m not very discriminating about what I read, magazine-wise. My favorites are House Beautiful, Vanity Fair and Bazaar, but I also get others ranging from Entertainment Weekly to the New Yorker – which is the one magazine that seems to sit there, mocking me, week after week – “put down that In Style and get some intellectual stimulation,” it screams at me.

My stack to be read. Note the multiple New Yorkers. I swear they are laughing at me.

I also get People and Us Weekly each week. They come together, every Thursday, like a pair of giggly teenage girls, filled with gossipy, fizzy nonsense that I like to refer to as junk food for my brain. Especially entertaining are the sections in Us Weekly that present pictures of celebrities that are supposed to reassure us that they are JUST LIKE US!!! You know, things like paying the parking meter, filling up the gas tank, getting cash at the ATM, and buying groceries – always at Whole Foods – with their adorable little kids sitting in the cart. And of course there’s always a picture or two of Heidi Klum or someone romping with their tykes at the park, everyone happy and laughing.

Have you seen the show “The New Normal“? It’s pretty entertaining. Ellen Barkin had a terrifically snarky line in a scene where she was sitting in a doctor’s office, reading one gossip magazine or another. I paraphrase here:

“Ok Jennifer Garner, we get it, you’re a great mom.”

Of all the weekly “CELEBRITIES ARE SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING THAN YOU” columns in Us Weekly (and these are far different from the JUST LIKE US sections), my favorite has to be the “what’s in my bag?” section. If you don’t read Us Weekly because you have much, much better things to do with your spare time than I do, let me explain this in brief: there’s a photo of a celebrity’s (ridiculously expensive but much desired) handbag and all of it’s contents, and the celebrity explains why she has some of the items in her bag. I find it hugely entertaining. More often than not they all have in their bags many of the same things I have in mine – perhaps not in the same quantity (like 16 lipsticks) or quality (like a Chanel wallet), but still, we carry around the very same stuff. So though their belongings may be a little more awesome than mine, they’re still schlepping it around with them everywhere they go just like I do.

Incredibly, when I google search the phrase “what’s in my bag,” there are hundreds of images of, in fact, women’s bags and their contents.

photo courtesy karenchili

So what’s in my bag? I’m not telling. Not because I don’t want you to know, but because it’s just so boring. After all, I’m not a celebrity. Yet.