When I was twelve I had a water bottle purse. This is a difficult-to-describe contraption, but it was essentially a sling for a regulation size bottle of Evian or Dasani or what not, with a clear plastic strap to hang on your shoulder and three elastic circles to hold the bottle in place. Another twelve-year-old at my summer theatre camp had one, and I was exceedingly jealous. She not only had a lead role in the play but also looked like a real-life version of the American Girl doll Samantha, and for some reason the water bottle purse was the third part of the holy trinity of jealousy for me.

I was thinking about my water bottle purse (can it really be called a purse if it’s mostly made up of empty space? But then, aren’t *all* purses primarily made up of empty space and formed by the things that go inside of them? I suppose the difference is that a traditional purse in which you can carry more useful and necessary items like money and tissues, and it has enclosed sides. Are enclosed sides a distinguishing feature of a purse? What are the features that we would use to teach AI how to recognize purses?) for two reasons: One, because I was thinking about the books that people my age would likely have as common childhood memories, and unlike 90s classics like tamagotchis and slap bracelets, I don’t know that “water bottle purses” are a nostalgic memory I can easily find anyone else to, you know, nostalge with about. And now I need a purse to put all of those prepositions in.

The second reason I thought fondly about my transparent vinyl strap of a tote was that my boyfriend was telling me about how, in Taiwan, people carry their own contraptions to house cups of bubble tea. I just tried to google image search this, after quickly realizing that my secondhand description was going to utterly fail, and unfortunately, my image search also failed. My understanding is that the contraption cuts down on some small amount of the plastic involved in drinking bubble tea, but doesn’t include a reusable cup? It has the top, or the top and the straw, or something along those lines…but it sounded like it might look like this only with a plastic top attached…?

Clearly, more research is needed. I’m a fan of bubble tea more in theory than in practice, but I think I finally threw out my water-purse (believe me, I kept it for years, until the plastic was looking a little less than transparent) and I really could get behind another mobile cup holder.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has one comment.