In high school, very few status symbols hold as much sway as the car you drive. It decides absolutely whether you will be accepted into the warm springs of grade school popularity or be forced to wither in the social sewers of the band room.

For my first car, my parents bought me a 1989 Volvo Wagon-- a car respected by neither geeks nor preps, but driven by both group's mothers. My parents' rationale in buying the vehicle was that it was a dependable, safe car that even had dual airbags. I couldn't argue with this logic. It was a very dependable vehicle: I could depend on that car to get me from point A to point B without a prom date. That was for damned sure! As for the "dual airbags", I'm pretty sure this referred to the two guys who sold it to us.

In other respects, my Volvo was not very reliable. In fact, if I told you I was "cruising with my top down", it just meant that my brakes had given out, and that I wasn't wearing a shirt at the time. You probably think I'm kidding about this. Well alright, I'll admit it: I was actually wearing a shirt, it just happened to be my little sister's. My brakes, on the other hand, I'm not lying about.

It occurred in late November of my Junior year of high school. I distinctly remember this date because one tends to remember all the times one has peed oneself after the age of five. More specifically, one tends to remember all the times one has peed oneself after the age of five when the person next to them has yelled "AWESOME! Let's do it again!" That's right: after losing control of the vehicle, nearly colliding with two oncoming cars and violently spinning to a screeching halt, my mentally impotent, then-friend Miles exclaimed "Awesome. Let's do it again." Though I haven't kept up with Miles, I assume he has since died of missing his mouth with a fork.

After the Volvo kicked the bucket, I began driving a silver Ferrari Diablo. However, I couldn't even get it out of the driveway before this guy knocked on the glass waving a pair of keys and politely asked that I get the f*ck out of his car before he kicked my ass, so I eventually settled for a green Toyota Camry---- a car not driven strictly by mothers, but by everyone and their mothers. There are so many dark green Toyota Camrys on the road these days, I'm starting to wonder if they're reproducing. Wouldn't that be awkward if you awoke in the middle of the night to find your Camry mounting another car in the garage:
Camry: Oh, Jesus! I mean---- Hi, Dean. Don't you knock?
Me: (groggily) Uhh, hey. What're you doing up? And who's SUV is that?
Camry: Hey she's not an SUV, alright! She might have a little trunk space but come on. The name's Julia.
Julia the Sedan: Hi.
Me: Hi, Julia.
Julia: I'm actually a 1989 Plymouth Sundance.
Me: Turbo?
Julia: (reluctantly) No.
Me: V6?
Julia: V4.
Me: Quite a find, Camry.
Camry: Shut up, Dean!
Me: Alright well keep it down. And I swear to God if I find anti-freeze stains on my workbench I'll kill you!

And thus concludes possibly the weirdest segment of text ever to grace the pixels of your computer monitor. Oh, who am I kidding?---- we've all been to that hampster dance website.

The Camry, however, has proved no more reliable than the Volvo. Either that or it wanted to get back at me for walking in on him because several weeks ago I pulled the handle to open my driver-side door and without hardly a tug, it snapped off in my hand. Unless you're incredibly strong or drive a car made entirely of Styrofoam, you realize how unusual this is.

For those of you who have never pulled off your door handle, it triggers some very conflicting emotions. At first you are shocked-- I believe the face I made was similar AOL's 'surprised' icon. Secondly, you are angered because your car is a piece of crap. This notion is followed by a brief moment of pride over your remarkable strength, and then you are again pretty pissed that your car's a piece of crap. It was a moment of cognitive dissonance and emotional confusion that I can only compare to the brief seconds of happiness one feels just after beating a video game and just before realizing they've spent 46 straight hours doing so.

I am a fairly careful driver. I have only gotten two tickets since receiving my license, and one of them isn't exactly relevant: "Magistrate, I know what the officer has said but if you'll just stop covering your eyes, I think you'll see that it's actually quite decent exposure. I mean, check out this boa!"

Fortunately, I have recently come across a way to defeat the parking ticket system on college campuses. Parking services weakness lays in the fact that they attach the ticket to your car by placing it under your windshield wiper. Thus, I have begun leaving my windshield wipers on when parked illegally. This forces the ticketers to either catch one of the wipers in rotation or get creative with where they stick the ticket, and both are equally amusing. So if you see a car parked in the middle of the library with the windshield wipers on 'fast' and several tickets wedged in the tail pipe, you'll know that's just me beating the system. You might say that that's an awful, negligent thing to do to my car. Don't worry too much---- Julia told me my Camry's into that kind of thing.



If you've got questions, responses, or you'd like to comment on my driving, please feel free to email me at comeydean@yahoo.com