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I have never been a neat person. This isn't to say that I didn't come from neat stock. My mother had four kids and worked full time, so I know that the dust under our beds, the empty jars of food in the refrigerator and the unidentifiable dirt at various places around our house were only there because she had other things to do and four very lazy kids. If my mother had tons of money and more ambitious kids, I know that our house would have been spotless. Growing up, I shared a room with my sister, who was a bigger slob than I was. Our room looked like a department store after the opening hours of a 60% off sale. Most of the clothing that was thrown around the room was not identifiable unless it was held up to the light. If you could figure out what you were looking at, it got a quick shaking to get rid of the dust (or whatever had collected there), then thrown on. I like to think that I was into conserving water and saving the environment even back then.I believe I started using purses somewhere around junior high school, 7th or 8th grade, I think it was. It seemed like a good idea, the purse. You could put all kinds of stuff in it that you could pull out whenever you needed it. What I didn't know at the outset of my life as a purse carrier was that, along with the stuff you put in there that you needed went even more stuff you didn't. This included (but was not limited to) used tissues, gum that had fallen out of wrappers, cough drops that had collected crumbs of unknown and probably unspeakable origins, earring backs, earrings with no companion earring, wrappers (not yet from cigarettes, but those would come a few years later, along with the loose tobacco on the bottom of the purse), old, unusable bus tickets, movie stubs, one or two paper clips and a key chain that held no keys. That's just a short list. These things remained in my bag until I either lost the bag or got a new one.A new bag. This became a way to escape fromt the old me. I would get a new purse, always a different size from the previous one, because I'd come to the conclusion that my misuse of the purse had less to do with my mismanagment of it than the actual size of the purse itself. Large bags, I decided, were just an invitation to possess more junk. Of course a smaller purse would change my life. So I became a small purse carrier. And what a revelation it was.The smaller purse was my cure for slobhood. And so obvious. After all, how would I be able to fit garbage in there if I could barely.