Is that a 56 year old man from Indiana carrying a purse?
Why yes it is! Ok so for 36 almost 37 years my wife Sheryl has been toting around my junk. By junk, I mean diacrap. The diacrap I need to go forth from the house. Of course when I first had diabetes my diacrap consisted of my hope that I would not go low, and it was easy to carry. All I need do is pack my hope in my mind, pack my wallet with some money and off I went. Then of course someone mentioned maybe instead of hopes I might want to carry some glucose tabs, how about some apple juice? Well as I got older that made sense. Then these meters came out and they were in nice little compact cases, and yes they fit right into Sheryl’s purse.
But how about pens (I prefer purple) and those TUDiabetes cards I want to pass out? How about those business cards I forgot to photograph? Well pretty soon Sheryl’s purse looked like vacation purse every time we walked out of house. You know vacation purse? If you have children you likely are familiar with vacation purse. That is what gets into your wife’s purse that is for children, the beach, and oh yeah the diacrap. I once weighed Sheryl’s vacation purse and I found she was lugging around about 8lbs of stuff.
Well my children grew up but as they exited the house Sheryl had hopes that vacation purse would be lighter. But instead of getting more room and less stuff, I started filling her regular purse with diacrap. Meters, apple juice, cell phone, cards, pens, paper, dextrose tabs, nutrition bar, extra money, business cards, discount cards and the crap goes on and on. Amazingly vacation purse became every day purse and well of course when one carries vacation purse (no matter how a good a sport your wife is) it gets old.
I promised Sheryl that when I thought 5% of men were carrying a purse I would carry one. The common names for such a thing are murse, man bag, backpack, merse, brosac, messenger bag, man pack, commuter bag, bailout bag, European carryall, field bag, cafe bag, metrosexual bag, hip bag, overnighter, possibles bag, patrol case, sash with pouch and of course my favorite purse.
I personally do not mind calling mine a purse. Hey I am comfortable with my sexuality I do not need to hide behind some kind of male specific label. Google gives us a tool to figure out commonly used terms it is called Google Trends and you can place any search term in the system and see how popular that trend is by year. Frankly there are darn few searches in this category, but the leader by far is man bag. It may not be a shock but England is the leader among countries where the search for man bag was concerned ("Google trends since 2004 ", 2014). Following England the top searches for Man bag were conducted in Singapore, Denmark, Malaysia, Australia, Ireland and rounding out the top 7 the United States ("Google trends since 2004 ", 2014). For the term murse the top search countries with significant results are Canada, United States, United Kingdom and Germany ("Google trends since 2004 ", 2014). I did not figure out why United Kingdom and England are separated. For fun I looked up two more. These are likely not in the top searches but I wondered how the world fared with a couple of different terms so I looked them up more for fun than anything. So merse a deviation of murse the top search countries were, Hungary and Italy all others countries were too small to measure ("Google trends since 2004 ", 2014). And of course I love the term brosac this term was never large enough to measure since 2004 ("Google trends since 2004 ", 2014).
So you can take from it what you want. I tend to think purse is the best understood. Of course there are is no way to distinguish in Google trends if the search is for a male purse or a female purse. So that is really no help. I am not wed to the term purse so if something else comes up that is very popular I will adopt it.
I purchased my purse, at Fossil. It is a Mercer EW Messenger bag. Here is the web site for the purse I bought.
http://www.fossil.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryView?catalogId=25005&storeId=12052&langId=-1&categoryId=331250&&cm_sp=2014Spring-LP_M_BAGS-4.10-_-VISUAL_NAV-_-FSSCMensBagsMessengers
At any rate for awhile I used a small bag but several things were wrong. First I really needed something I could put over my head and carry it cross body. Especially cross body and not up too high. I am a big guy and this strap is big enough. Nothing else I tried was even close. I really liked the Fossil Estate City Bag but it was way too high on my side when I put it cross body. Still for smaller people it would work well. I am 6’2” or so. Second it was never really big enough to carry my diacrap. And finally, this is pretty superficial but I wanted a leather purse. Why? I just did.
Here are some pictures of my purse and what I carry in it. I hope it they might be helpful for some men looking for a purse, murse, brosac whatever. So when you see me walking down the street carrying my purse whistle if you like, call me a name or two, but know this I like having my diacrap close. Oh so does my wife, she loves my purse. Let’s face a real man carries his own diacrap.
References
Google trends since 2004 (2014). Retrieved April 29, 2014, from http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=man%20bag%2C%20murse%2C%20merse%2C%20brosac&cmpt=q
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