My bag is laden with doodads and I like it that way
I love a little doodad. A device, a googaw, a widget, a trinket, a trifle. Doodads are one of the best things going, and I believe we as a culture were remiss at best in allowing corporations to try and condense every doodad available down to a single slab-shaped flagship item.
Not only am I a lover of the doodad, I am also a big fan of the noble unitasker. The thing that in addition to being able to do a thing is also engineered in the pursuit of doing that thing well, and comfortably, and yes, almost always exclusively. My iPod Nano 7 may not be able to serve multiple terrabytes of music, may not display lyrics on screen, may not be connected to a news feed about concerts near me, but it also does not intentionally disrupt my experience or try to feed me Taylor Swift content. It has never, against my consent, shown me the craven image of Joseph Rogan. Too many deride the unitasker for what it 'cannot' do, but it's my belief that as multitasking devices only grow more irritating and bloated it becomes important to praise a device for that which it does not do.
So, what's in my bag (usually)?
Cellphone: The CAT S22 Flip, a weird little freak of a phone that I love so dearly I'm buying a spare. It runs a version of Android, flips shut, and can be heaved off an overpass without a care in the world. I got this thing for two reasons:
-I am a klutz, and destroyed around half the smartphones I've ever owned.
-Slabphones are misery to me.
It's technically capable of smartphone-y things like web browsing and serving me Spoofy, but I use it pretty exclusively as a telephone and to run third party wi-fi calling and texting apps like LINE. It's other main function is as an emergency wi-fi hotspot.
Typing Object: iPad Air 2. It was $60 at a thrift shop, having been donated en masse by a local school redoing their computer lab, and it does what I want. It runs iOS 15, which enables me to run things like Scrivener, Orion ad-free browser, Find My, and Spotify/Spoofy if I feel like it. It's a good size for looking something up in the event I desperately need to do that, and more importantly it's comfortable to type on even if I don't have my Bluetooth keyboard. It lives in a leatherette folio case that also folds into a stand and holds documents and a pen, and which cost ~$15. If I want to sync my work and don't have wi-fi, well, the S22 has my back. I don't need unmatched upload speeds to upload a rich text document to Dropbox.
Scribbling Object: Leuchtturm1917, specifically the dot grid Bauhaus edition in size A5. This is my journal/diary/brain dump/scrapbook, and it lives in a real leather slip cover made at some point by a Boy Scout at camp and later donated to the same thrift shop that furnished my iPad. It's also strapped with a Bookaroo phone holder that holds not a cellular telephone but a grip of pens and pencils I use most often.
Noise maker and world killer: iPod Nano 7, which I carry in a little coin purse with both my Airpod Pros and a set of wired earphones. If you, like me, are the kind of autistic person who can and does listen to the same song/album on repeat for hours, 16GB is plenty. I'd originally gotten this one to give to a friend but it wound up having a hinky software fight with Windows that made me reluctant. Months later I've figured out how to resolve that problem and make it behave, so I'm on the hunt for another one to rehome. It uses Bluetooth flawlessly, the battery's great. My one reservation overall in using and recommending it is that it is very small and frail in feel, which is why it lives in its padded pouch.
Moment Snagging Object: Fujifilm Instax Mini Evo, a hybrid digital and instant print camera that I finally received this month after watching it sit on backorder for Some Time. It's a popular little device, like most Instax cameras, and not without reason. The depths of my satisfaction with the machine go beyond even this, but I love it because it meets my dream criteria: I want a digital media object that can print copies without an external printer, and I want an instant film camera I don't have to stop using once I run out of film. This is usually sitting in its spot in my back organizer, or it's tethered to my wrist if I'm on a photo walk.
And those are my doodads. Sometimes there's a Kindle Oasis hanging out in there, but not super often since that's my sweet sweet bedtime boy I can read without a light on in the room.