Switching Pockets

For years, my dad has been telling me that I should carry my wallet in my front pocket.

I’ve always carried it in my back pocket partly because everyone else does and partly because I hate having more than one thing in each pocket. Putting my wallet behind me let me keep my keys on the left and my phone on the right, safely out of contact with each other.

In Israel, however, my wallet was stolen. I didn’t even notice it’d been taken from my back pocket until I tried to pay the cab fare home.

After replacing my wallet via mail-order-parents (because apparently England doesn’t make tri-folds…I guess their money isn’t really long enough to warrant them), I’ve taken to dilligently carrying my wallet in my front pocket.

It’s been interesting to see how easy the switch was. Maybe it’s that I’ve only been carrying a wallet for a relatively short amount of time (maybe eight years?) compared to a lot of people. But somehow I expected switching pockets to be weird and deeply confusing. People who carry a wallet (mostly men) in their pocket with basically everything personal in it will understand how weird a sensation not having a wallet is.

I thought maybe moving it would be similarly weird. It hasn’t been.

After the initial paranoia wore off, I decided that, what the hell, I’ll start carrying it in my back pocket again. Fifteen minutes later, I reached for my back pocket and realized with a shock that it was empty, wait---it was in my front pocket again?

So I gave up. It’s safer there, and if I’ve trained myself to put it there, why fight it? It’s just that every now and then my wallet switches pockets without my consciously realizing it.