Outgoing baggage

Last weekend I was (sarcastic adjective here) enough to have my purse stolen, a watershed moment in any girl's life, though one I had been hoping to put off til old age, when I would snatch back the purse and begin hitting the thief over the head, surprising him with my spunk. I hadn't realized purse theft still happened in NYC, and in this day and age, I don't really see much of a profit in it, but I suppose they can always bring it back to the Artful Dodger or whatever it is people do when they steal knockoff purses from the kinds of bars that offer such specials as "Hey, you, come here. Drink this."

I'm not sure a top hat and ascot are the best way for a pickpocket to "blend in" with the crowd.

While not worried about someone assuming my name or credit line- woe to the person that plays the identity theft lottery and comes up as me- I was definitely concerned with the fact that I had lost my keys. Wanting nothing more than to sleep in my own bed and slit my wrists with my own knives, my friends John and Lee forced entry into the building and I called my landlords, a 70+ Polish couple who have managed to conquer the NYC real estate market despite an inability to conjugate verbs in anything other than the present tense. After a brief phone conversation, I walked to meet the man half of the couple, adopting the proper level of shame that a girl must exhibit when meeting up with a 70-year-old man at 2 AM wearing the world's shortest skirt ("Nice shoes," I said sarcastically to John earlier. "Nice vagina," said he. Touche.), and brought him back to my apartment. Though by the grace of God and Arthritis I was able to beat him up the stairs without exposing anything, and had managed to craft a pretty sympathetic little sob story that danced around the fact that I had been hanging out in dive bars dressed as someone who would be described in a court of law as "asking for it", the opening of my apartment door grandly revealed the remnants of a couple of earlier hours spent entertaining at my apartment, and the night's activities could not have been any more obvious unless Peter O'Toole himself was standing in my kitchen refilling his highball. After sending him on his way, my credit check effectively nullified, my friends extraordinaire bought me a slice of pizza that made my troubles seem so far away, pressed twenties in my hand, and went their merry way.

Skirt: Hydrogen isotope

The next morning, after purchasing a cup of coffee the size of my torso and briefly revelling in a Sunday morning in which my mother had no way of feverishly contacting me to dispense such wisdoms as "Don't eat poison" and "(TLC Show) says that you can make a small space seem bigger through the creative use of shelves!", I hurried through the rounds of reclaiming my life, including the purchase of a sleek little cell phone number that I manhandled for the rest of the afternoon. On Monday, as I was on the phone with the last of my card companies, the bar called- they'd found my purse with everything in it, in stark contrast to the previous morning's visit and query, at which I was told they had not found my purse with everything in it. While for some people, this represents a restored faith in humanity, a fuzzy of warmth for fellow mankind, I was pissed to have to have gone through the hassle, and even more pissed when I found that the only things missing from the purse were the cash and the somewhat expensive new concealer I had just purchased, which meant the perpetrator was either female or a mime.

"Wait a minute! I'm going to die alone! Silently."

Even worse, I was now faced with the Sophie's Choice of phones. I'd grown oddly attached to the new one over the course of two days, like when they let you take the classroom hamster home for the weekend and come Monday morning, and you found yourself contemplating going all Gere. I never had any problems with the old phone, we had a strong working relationship, but as soon as it was out of sight, this new phone was the flexible blonde secretary, all sleek and contoured, and any devotion I had to the old battleaxe melted away. There's the new ad slogan right there: "Samsung: Phones so good you'll find yourself making longwinded, creepily sexual comparisons about them."

Anyways, I decided to go the self-flagellatory route and return the pretty new phone. If I were a better person, I'd probably learn a lesson from all this, but, you know, eh.