My life & used car salespeople - a three week odyssey

I've spent an inordinate amount of time in the past 3 - 4 weeks doing car stuff. Insurance, rental, shopping, test driving, researching, haggling, loan applications, at the mechanic, getting a ride to the mechanic, driving on rural highways, driving (or rather waiting) in State Fair traffic, loading the car, unloading the car, and finally buying a freakin' car. For someone who lives exactly 1.2 miles from work and prefers to spend the sunny cool days of early and mid fall on foot or bike, this has been a lot of car time, and while it hasn't been entirely unpleasant, it has been exhausting and unusual.

I have learned a great deal during the course of this odyssey, not only about cars, but about the human psyche at its most raw and gendered. On and off the used car lots, everything lately seems to me to be about the tension between genuine human connection and salesmanship, between strong protective maleness and aggressive sleazy maleness, and between true valuable beauty and showy hollow beauty. It's following me into bars, to work functions, even to my volunteer gig as a writing tutor. Suddenly, everyone's a salesman! Pretty weird, and definitely not all bad.

So, when it comes to a young woman buying a car, the men in her midst seem to fall into several categories:

The first, perhaps obviously, is the Dad-guys. Dad-guys are protective and trustworthy. Whether or not they are actually experts in car stuff, they have more expertise than I do, and they let me know that, as respectfully as they can. :) Now, the Dad-guys in my car buying odyssey included my own actual Dad, as well as another SuperDad I brought with me car shopping one day for back up, and the salesman I ultimately bought the car from. Dad-guys one and two were of course very genuine and pretty helpful (and I thank them!!), while Dad-guy three said slippery things to me like, "Now, you know I have a daughter, and I wouldn't let you leave here with that car if I thought you were getting ripped off. I really think you're getting a very good price." Notice how suddenly this is not a two-way interaction between him, the salesman, and me, the buyer....he's made it into a three way interaction between him, the trustworthy Dad-guy who has my best interest at heart, me, the smart daughter, and some mysterious car selling third party that he is protecting me from? Interesting sales ploy, eh?! Hah! It's smart though, and I bet it works. My Dad probably doesn't know more about cars than the average industrious gent, but he is inextricably bound up with cars in many of my childhood memories. My Dad has been on more road trips with me to more places than any other living creature on the face of the planet, by a factor of five at least. We've been to FL and back several times, cross country to CA twice, and to and from half the state parks, campgrounds and concert venues in the Northeastern United States. (Not to mention our road trips in China, though technically neither of us was driving, so I'm not sure if that counts...) I remember very well driving with my Dad from FL to NY when I was about 4 years old in the new yellow 1984 Volvo station wagon he drove for the next 20 years. He had a CB radio that he hooked up, and we talked to truck drivers and to the receptionist at the motel we were headed for. "Breaker breaker, this is Mr. Yellow, do you copy?" I've been on the phone with my Dad during every major and semi-major car situation I've ever encountered - break downs, repairs, stranded-on-the-highway situations. My Dad even taught me to drive. Of course, I didn't pass the first road test I took, but he's still the primary car guy in my life, and so Mr. Salesguy picked the right sociocultural associations to make. Slick!

Then, the second type of man in my car-buying life: the Cousin-guy, which I have dubbed Cousin-guy because this class of gents reminded me of my cousin Josh, who helped me when I was buying Pablo. They're much younger than the Dad-guys, but older than me and far more knowledgeable than I am about cars. They're very helpful to have around and mean well, but they can take the whole thing a little too seriously and are prone to getting a little pissed at me if I don't follow their advice to the letter. Veddy interesting.

The third group is the Uncle-guys, whom I have dubbed Uncle-guys because they remind me of my Uncle Nick of Hyannis Foreign Auto - Cape Cod, MA. My mechanic in Raleigh, Harry, is DEFINITELY an Uncle-guy, and not just because he's from Boston and sounds like the Car Talk guys. ;) Uncle guys are brief and to the point, extremely helpful in just the ways you need them to be, they watch out for you, but they never ever imply that you're an idiot. Esotic was mostly an Uncle-guy during the Rhonda mission, too.

The last type is the Desperate-type, characterized by flipping between one of the above types and something much less subtle. The phrases "We can work something out for you on this number," and then "What will it take?!?!" are characteristic. If you don't run screaming, you can actually get a very good deal out of these guys by telling them exactly what it will take. In the case of the guys who sold me Rhonda, I actually used a little desperation-stoking strategy I will from now on call the "talking to Mom" strategy - this particular salesman was helpless against it. It involved sitting in his office with his door closed on the phone with my mother for about 30 minutes. She checked the car price on Blue Book for me, which was helpful, but mostly it made him very nervous, made him think I was about to leave without the car. When I came out, he was ready to take just about any price I offered. Sweet!

Anyway, it was a highly interesting journey through paperwork and maleness, with lots of interesting sociocultural stuff to ponder under the surface of it. Thanks for reading folks - I'll post pictures of Rhonda soon!

Poor Pablo

Poor Pablo!

Pablo is my 1997 VW Golf. Pablo and I have been together three and a half or four years now. A little over an hour ago, he was parked out front of my house, minding his own business, and a woman in a Mitsubishi rear-ended him. That's right, hit my car, while it was parked, and hit it hard, too. Pushed it forward at least a car length and up on to the curb. Screwed up the back left side of the car so bad, the two driver side doors won't close completely, and metal from the body is now touching the back left tire, rendering the vehichle un-drive-able.

I was on the couch diddling around on this here computer when I heard the CRACK outside and thought, shit, someone got into an accident! Oh wait, shit, my car's parked out there....and lo and behold, it was my poor unassuming Pablo. Shit, shit.

I'm lucky, really. The woman stopped, got out, spoke with the police when I called them, apologized, fretted, etc. She was sweet. Freaking out, but sweet and kind of helpless, it made me feel really bad for her. It appears she is insured, which is good. I've just spent the past hour on the phone with my insurance company and then hers....it's a big damn hassle, and inconvenient and all the rest, but it'll certainly be OK.

I've been feeling antsy and unsettled lately about what I am suddenly acutely aware is relatively stupid stuff. Little stuff, if you will. I'm getting over a case of the sniffles and they've made me grouchy and a bit harried as I try to make up the time I lost at work while I was sick. I have wee fits of envy as people around me are doing really enviable things like buying their first homes, falling in love, and/or having babies, and related fits of insecurity about my own comparatively slow pace of maturation in all those departments. I had the gall to bitch to a 33-year-old over the phone today that I'm going to be 27 in a few months, and gosh aren't I getting old. Wah wah. I miss my ex horribly, and I've almost talked myself into calling him a few times lately, but I know I shouldn't and it'd be a stupid and selfish thing to do right now and so I don't and it just makes me feel icky. Wah wah, woe is me.

So I've been angsty over these minor stupid dramas, but you know what? Life could be a lot more dramatic. I could be uninsured, or she could be. I could have been in the car. It could have been me and Dave and Indy driving around earlier this evening and getting hit. She could have been hurt. She was just talking on her cell phone, the driver who hit my car tonight, just calling her boyfriend to tell him she was on her way home for dinner. That simple. Just a split second. Freaky!

It underscores for me something that I know I should already know - all of life's little stupid things aren't worth sweating over if they keep you from living the rest of your life. I know, I know. I think I do a better job at that at some times than at others.

Anyway, it's too dark to photograph outside now, but I'll post pictures of my poor damaged Pablo soon. Wish me luck.

Break from self!

I journal incessantly when I travel.

It's partly the traveler's impulse to document the journey, so I won't forget any of the good stories, and how completely out of my everyday world I got. (....we rode in a train compartment through rolling green Polish countryside with the hot wind blowing us around, accompanied only by an elderly man with crazy white hair and beard [made much crazier by the wind-blown effect, no doubt] and an ENORMOUS white shepherd dog, easily 200 lbs or more, that took up the entire floor of the compartment and left 5 inch-long white hairs on our pants everytime he walked by. They were on their way to a dog show in Krakow, having started in Vienna. On the train. In the wind. So simple, really, yet just a few hairs away from being anything that would ever happen at home. Don't even have to get in to any of the 2-AM-maze-like-train-station-in-cyrillic-where-are-we stuff.)

There's also some touch of an artist's vanity in there, or a student's part study, part show off - like someday, someone will read this and be very impressed by my powers of observation, the depth of my genuis insights on culture and history and politics and art, and the gritty eloquence of my writing! Arrr! Of course, that will only be if they can read the handwriting, which is becoming less and less likely the older I get. I was once an amateur calligrapher!! :::sigh:::

And, I can't deny that journalling is also just a way to constructively (and inexpensively) use the looooong stretches of time spent on trains or waiting on lines that would otherwise be spent sleeping, stressed out, spending money, bored, or some combination thereof.

But more and more, I think I use journal time when I'm traveling to observe myself, which is interesting, and leads to important insights I'm sure, but also gets very exhausting. How do I feel? What am I thinking about? What am I afraid of? What do I miss? What's hard? What's fun? It's part of the whole traveler-as-observer thing - I observe new places and people, I observe the art and the architecture and the landscape and the food, and while I'm at it, I observe myself, much more closely and in much greater detail than usual, and I start to get sick of myself. Bleh.

So, this is a long winded explanation for why it's been a solid month+ since I put keypad to blog (or pen to journal) and wrote anything. I've been on a bit of a hiatus from the self-analysis that makes up a good portion of my journal and blog entries, taking a little break from me and seeing what's new with everyone else. It's been lovely!

I do love writing, and though the break has been nice, I don't think it's ever good to just up and ignore my internal life like that for very long! It's funny, how not writing really IS like I've ignored what's going on in there - ah, the introvert's brain is a strange, strange place indeed. So anyway, I'm ready to come back now!

Finally!

I've finally posted photos from the Eastern Europe trip. Enjoy!

Getting out of Lviv

Suffice it to say that getting out of Lviv, Ukraine was as hard - if not harder - than getting in. That story, were I to tell it here, would involve a three different windows at a ticket office in town, a travel agency, a tourist information center, a long smelly tram ride, several ticket windows at the train station itself, one English-speaking Ukrainian, 2 Peace Corps Volunteers, almost an entire day, and some really antiquated looking gizmos for stamping out train tickets.

I am glad we went there, and awfully glad we made it out, and would not recommend that anyone else attempt it without learning Ukrainian first. Aye!