Tropical Island Seagrass Purse!

Mojo's Island Vacation Week!

Yep, Mojo's theme this week is any of those lovely tropical islands people vacation on. Not that I would know what I'm talking about. Being the proud stick-in-the-mud that she is, Mojo has never been to any of them. Yet ironically her house is filled with tourist crap like what you'll see this week. I guess there's no need to actually spend the thousands of dollars on such a vacation when you can just buy some crap on eBay and pretend you went!

Take this beauty, for instance (please!). It's a little seagrass sort of purse that someone gave me after their trip to Hawaii or Aruba or Tahiti or whatever. Now, as far as I'm concerned, purses are rather like bathing suits. You can't just accept any old random one that someone decides to buy for you. It's a personal decision you have to make for yourself. So while I appreciate the thought and caring concern that giving me a gift indicates, I'd rather in the future people didn't buy me a purse. Okay? But if you, on the other hand, think This Is The One For Me, by all means come take it!

It measures about eight inches square, so it's really not practical for carrying things other than a wallet and maybe a small camera. As you can see it is lined with cloth. As you can't see there is a little cloth pocket inside, so if you have, say, a single photo of a loved one you can tuck it in there along with your wallet and small camera.

It has wooden handles. Good thing it is not too big, because if you really loaded this baby up with lead or something I'm guessing the wooden handles would not be the most comfortable things to carry for any great length of time. There is also a little toggle and a leather strap in a feeble attempt to keep your wallet and small camera and picture of your loved one (or big piles of lead) inside. I forget where it came from, but rest assured whoever gave it to me bought it somewhere like Bermuda or Hawaii or Aruba and carried it thousands of miles all the way home just to give it to me as a gift and to rub their trip in my face.

Now if you are a typical tourist looking for cultural artifacts to bring home and clutter your house, you might think to yourself, "Self, I simply must have this purse. I can't imagine a finer example of Native Craftsmanship than this lovely seagrass purse here on this lovely tropical island paradise. I'm going to carry this home on the plane and display it proudly in my living room (or carry it around with me as a real purse) and when people ask where I got it I will use that as a segue to describe my idyllic island vacation. Yep, life is good to me in that I can go to these foreign lands and barter with the natives and enrich myself with all these great worldly experiences, unlike losers like that Mojo person who merely sits at home flogging her pathetic secondhand wares from her computer keyboard and never actually goes anywhere."

Nice. Remind me never to invite you over my house. Not that I ever would, but if you're going to have a major 'TUDE like that I so doubly wouldn't invite you. So there. But the joke is on you, poor deluded world traveler you, and not on Mojo, who can once again pretend that she is secretly better than you. Because if you bother to read the tags sewn into the cloth lining of this lovely purse, you would learn that it is in fact made in China. So you traveled to all these exotic locations and bartered with the natives and dragged this stuff home to display in your house and feel oh-so-culturally superior for nothing. I'm guessing the natives probably went home that night and laughed at you, especially if you tried to be really culturally sensitive and asked them how to say "purse" in their native language so the next time you encountered them you could say "purse", when what you really probably should learn how to say is something infinitely more practical, like "Where's the bathroom?".

Or you could be like my Favorite Younger Sister, who went to Greece and decided to ask a cop for directions and figured out what to say via some guidebook and then approached the guy and asked him the question and she sounded so good, without the tiniest trace of accent, that the guy started blabbing all over the place at her and she had to stop him and wave her book in front of his face to show him she was in fact a tourist and needed to be told things using tiny words spoken very slowly.

Anyway, for all I know these lovely purses are also available in Greece, seeing how they're made in China and I doubt the Chinese really care who buys them and from where so long as they're bought. So if I were you I would stay home and buy this lovely seagrass purse off of eBay and then just tell your friends you got it in some exotic lovely sunny place. Tell them you got the Certificate of Craptacularity somewhere exotic, too. You know Mojo--I will always keep my mouth shut, unless someone actively bribes me. Then I will hold out for the highest bidder, and sing like a canary for whoever wins. Happy bidding--on this lovely purse, for now, not my silence; for that you should expect an extra charge depending on who I am supposed to lie to and the specifics of the lie--and enjoy your island vacation in your own home by skipping around your house with this tiny little purse on your arm while singing the old "Come Back to Jamaica" tourism song in a fake Jamaican accent. That's what *I* do for fun with a gift like this. Not everyone can live a life as culturally rich and full as I do, but here's a tiny, tiny piece of it for your very own, so you may bask in my doubly-reflected glory....