Slightly more than a month ago, although it seems longer to me now, I came to possess that symbol of rebellious teenage freedom, my own car. I don't know if it the freedom it symbolizes for me personally is of the rebellious teenager variety any longer, as I'm nearly 20 years old, but it was still a big deal. I'd put off learning to drive simply because I had absolutely nowhere I needed to be able to take myself, and also because both of my parents' cars were manual transmission, which is even trickier to learn when you're still getting used to moving a whole car around in addition to having to shift. Unfortunately, when I started school and found a new job, I really, really needed to be able to drive like, immediately, and after a good eight hours of driving lessons and nearly six months of tooling around the Ohio countryside in my mother's brand new Prius, I finally acquired my license. Around the same time my mom happened to locate a used car for me, and given the convenient timing and the fact that it was inexpensive and in wonderful condition, we decided that it had to be the one. No complaints so far.
Later that day, as I stood in the driveway admiring my new car (it was hard to do much else that weekend, and I still find myself gazing out into the car park through my bedroom window from time to time), my father said to me, in essence, "You know, there's something quintessentially American about having a car and being able to take yourself places without relying on anyone else. It really captures our spirit of independence. Just think, if you wanted to, you could go out for a drive just for the sake of it!"
Of course, my response, being the pragmatic pessimist that I am, was "What, and waste perfectly good gas? That stuff's expensive!"
But today, as I threaded my way into a parking space in front of the shop where I purchase my hair color, closed the sunroof, and turned off my iPod, I thought, wow. A month ago I would have had to ask my mom to drive me out here, or waited until she was going out to run errands anyway. But here I am, with my own car, fueled by gas that I paid for with money from my crappy part-time job, with the wind in my hair and Nomico twittering Bad Apple!! at a potentially lethal volume through the stereo, about to buy a new coating of purple for my hair. How amazingly awesome is that? How uniquely American!
I think that the reason that car lust is such an innately American thing is because, between centuries of group-mentality societal practices and the fact that things are just closer together, independent transportation isn't as big a deal for most of the rest of the world. A car is just another thing that needs to be purchased and maintained, and when you're living in an urban area with trains and buses a-plenty, it's unnecessary. Here, or at least in the Midwest, where I live, not only do we have an ancestral mentality whereby doing things yourself is the preferred course of action, but also plenty of wide open spaces to be traversed that make setting up trains incredibly costly and inefficient. Hence the necessity of the car to be able to go anywhere at all, and hence the amazing romanticization of it.
My car isn't even anything particularly fancy. It's a red 2002 Ford ZX2 with over 100,000 miles on it and an idle that's so rumbly it's like sitting in a massage chair at red lights. Still, it's my own little bubble where everything is the way I want it. I control how far down the windows are or how high the A/C is, and if I want to drive around blasting selections from the Twilight* soundtrack, that's my business. Eating and drinking are permitted, although trash goes in the grocery bag on the floor, thank you very much. My car tells people everything they need to know about me, from the Aperture Science parking pass on the windshield to the Gadsden Flag on the rear window, to the "What Would Gordon Freeman Do?" and "Kayabuki/Aramaki 2012" stickers on the back bumper. While public transportation may be more economical in some respects, no amount of frugality can ever replace the sense of independence that comes from owning a car. God bless America.
*Note: Born Contrarian Amalgamated Enterprises LLC does not endorse the Twilight franchise, except as snark bait - the first movie had a bitchin' soundtrack is all.
