I had a brief brush with hysteria today. Well, more than I usually do on any given weekday. I rounded up the posse of children I own (there are only two of them, but sometimes it feels like I’ve had to round them up instead of just grab one in each hand) and took them back to school shopping, but while I was there I thought I had left my wallet in one of the fifty-two stores we had to visit trying to find the right kind of three-ring binder. I had a brief panic attack but pulled myself together fairly quickly once I realized there was nothing in there worth backtracking for.

My wallet is mostly a container for crap that I don’t want floating around in my purse, and the occasional thing that the government requires me to have on my person like the typical driver’s license and proof of insurance. Any would-be thief (or the detectives if they’ve found my wallet in the bushes near my body) would probably drive it back to my house and apologize, just out of embarrassed pity.

My wallet contains:

A Lego VIP card, for all those times I need to brush past the little people and make my way up to the oversized bouncer with the clipboard at the entrance to the Lego store. Having a burly man with an earpiece open the velvet rope just for me has never felt so good. Of course, it’s also the only time I’ll get someone to give me exclusive backstage access to anything, so Danish plastic building blocks might as well be the crappy reward for it.

A $4 postage stamp, courtesy of my mom who paid me back for Starbuck’s one day with a stamp. Literally. Like I’m going to mail a really oversized letter to someone and think, “Hell yeah, Mom, that stamp came in so freakin’ handy! You could have been a sucker and paid me in cash but no way! I have a stamp! Suck it, rest of America!”

The phone number for the press secretary to the governor of Florida. Well, at least until the next election, anyway. But the great thing is I never wrote who the number is on the scrap of paper, so it’s all mysterious. If I’m found clutching that piece of paper and the cops call it, just in case it’s a lead, and then the intern who answers the phone says, “Governor Scott’s press secretary, may I help you?” they’re gonna think I’m just AWESOME and involved in some big political scandal! (Okay, I’m actually seriously carrying the governor’s press sectretary’s phone number in my wallet, and there’s an excellent reason for that: I stuck it in there one day while doing an interview with the guy, and I don’t want to throw it away but I always forget it’s in there until the next time I see it.)

Two mostly-stamped customer appreciation punch cards, one to Books A Million and one to the frozen yogurt bar. The sad thing is whoever finds my wallet is gonna know that I spend a lot more time eating dessert than reading.

My boating license. This little piece of paper allows me to pilot any vessel small enough to not be used for transporting crude oil, despite the fact that I live in an almost-entirely landlocked state. It also sets me apart from Spongebob in the fact that I have passed my boating course and he has not.

A fortune from a fortune cookie. Yes, I know fortune cookies are hokey and they’re not even actually Chinese. I also know it stinks of UC-Berkley-liberal-arts-major angst to keep the fortunes from your fortune cookies. But this one said, “Ignore previous cookie.” When am I ever going to get one that spectacular ever again?

My blood donor card. This one is really awesome. I carry it with me because it makes me look like an absolute Mother Teresa since it states in giant letters that I have given over a gallon of blood. Yeah, let that visual sink in. I could throw up in my mouth at the image of a milk jug full of my own blood. Sadly, I am no longer able to give blood because it was discovered that I have probably been exposed to mad cow disease. I really, really wish that was a craptastic joke.

There are a few other random tidbits of uselessness in there, like my debit card, but otherwise it’s a pretty boring panoramic view of my adult life. I think I’m just used to having it on my person, otherwise I’d be just as happy to leave it on the check-out counter of the fourth shoe store I visited in one day looking for sparkly Converse sneakers. Oh wait, I’ve already done that. It’s no where near as interesting as having the would-be serial killer take off with it, but he wouldn’t even want to keep it as a souvenir of his latest kill. It’d be too depressing.