CAROLYN DeCARLO

Is an American writer living in New Zealand.
She has always carried a big purse.
Read more of her stories and poems here:
http://carolyndecarlo.tumblr.com/writing
  1. eyeglass cleaner, clearlycontacts.co.nz. i like to pull out the massive blue cleaning cloth and spend about 5 min cleaning my glasses, especially when i’m in the office. my last pair of glasses got really scratched up because i exclusively used my shirts/dresses to clean them. i am trying to take better care of my belongings.
  2. keys. the red key is for my house. last year i had to share a house key with jackson. we moved rooms in our flat and now we have our own keys. the blue swipe key is for work. i have to swipe three times to get to my desk.
  3. debris, or souvenirs from america. the BART destinations guide is from my layover in san francisco when i met janey smith and had a fainting spell on his couch. the white ticket stubs are from seeing a coffee in berlin at e street cinema in washington, dc. the yellow tickets are from seeing hedwig and the angry inch on broadway with my parents and jackson.
  4. air new zealand pen. jackson and i requested extra leg room on our trans-pacific flights. without realising it, this meant we booked two modular space pods on air new zealand’s two-week-old boeing 777-300. i considered getting dressed up for the occasion but ended up wearing a pajama dress. the seats were incredibly fancy. everyone got their own pouch full of goodies, including clarins lip balm and hand crème, an eye mask, and socks./li>
  5. owl coin purse. given to me by jackson’s mom, i use this pouch to hold my american coins and rewards cards. most useful when we were in los angeles. i used all the coins bigger than pennies to bulk up the tip on our taxi out to manhattan beach in gratitude after i was physically and verbally assaulted by another taxi driver at the airport.
  6. maybelline baby lips lip balm. also given to me by jackson’s mom. has not helped me out of any altercations yet, but has been keeping my lips moisturised since january.
  7. wallet and passport cover, kate spade. i have owned and used both of these items since 2010 and 2009 respectively. the wallet stopped looking new after a couple of uses but the passport cover still looks new today. in my passport photo, i am still 18 years old. i carry my passport around with me everywhere since moving to new zealand, even though i have had a new zealand drivers license since february, when i was pulled over for speeding in auckland and told i would be fined $400 if i didn’t get one within a week.
  8. mathilda by mary shelley and beside myself by ashley farmer. mathilda is a novella about incest by the author of frankenstein that i’m reading for my novella project. i am trying to read 52 novellas this year. at the beginning, i recorded which ones i had read but i stopped and now i’m not sure how many i’ve read. my shelf looks about half full. beside myself is a short story collection published by tiny hardcore press. i finished reading it but it’s still in my bag because i’m reviewing it for the lit pub. so far, i’ve mostly just written a review of the spit children by jo randerson.
  9. boarding passes, air new zealand, united, and amtrak. a jumble of tickets i used to get from new zealand to the united states, from los angeles to san diego, and from the united states to new zealand. jackson and i stayed in la for two days before taking a red eye to baltimore. we took the train to san diego, where we spent a day with ana c and theron jacobs and sat on a bench for a really long time with juliet escoria. they were all lovely.
  10. flyers for eamonn marra’s man on the verge of a nervous breakdown at bats theatre. eamonn marra is a comedian and a writer and a musician and probably a lot of other things too. two documentaries have been made about eamonn marra. eamonn and i share a wall between our rooms. eamonn’s overhead light burned out a few months ago and now he wears a headlamp to bed like he is going spelunking. eamonn has never been spelunking. when i went to the states, eamonn had 16 records delivered to my parents’ house. jackson and i brought them back in our suitcase.
  11. three tampax sport tampons in super. my friends in new zealand mostly use tampons without applicators, or they use menstrual cups. step three on the wikihow for inserting a tampon without an applicator says to make sure your hands are clean and your vagina is moist. i am really bad at putting in tampons without applicators. sometimes it’s hard to find the ones with applicators here but i like the u by kotex ones. they have a gummy grip on them. i’ve never seen that before. one of my friends called my tampons fancy when she used one.
  12. extra large band-aids. i wore heels a lot in my early 20s. i brought them to new zealand with me, but i could count on one hand the number of times i’ve worn them here. wellington is very hilly, and i live near the top of one, on a pedestrian access only street that is just a series of steps. when i was in america, i only wore my new sensible shoes, but it was really hot and i got a blister on the back of my ankle anyway. i found these mammoth sized band-aids in the bathroom on my parents’ sail boat.
  13. vintage black leather backpack-style purse. this is the best purse i have ever owned. i found it for $40 at a weekend market. it might have been the first thing i bought when i moved to wellington. it has a shoulder strap that unzips into two straps so you can wear it like a backpack. the zipper is on the inside, against your back, so i never feel like someone is going to reach in and steal my stuff. i have an irrational fear that someone will want to steal my passport. nobody in new zealand wants an american passport. when i was in the states, i found this bag’s twin in tan. my mom bought it for around $140 on sale and now we are purse twins. one of the straps on my bag broke back in may and when i brought it in to get fixed, i asked to get it cleaned up. the repair man told me i could do it myself a lot cheaper. he sold me dye and leather cream for $25 and he made me feel confident. i spent about two hours dyeing the whole bag, let it set for two days and then put cream all over it and buffed it the next morning and now it looks even more amazing. i love this bag and i hope nothing bad ever happens to it.