Change is hard.
Blast from the past, posting here on livejournal, huh? There have been a number of times lately that I've thought about typing up a post/personal entry/introspective ramble somewhere, and this seems like as good a place as any to put it.
I bought a new car over the weekend. I picked it up today, and traded in my old car at the same time. New car, super exciting! Right? Well...
I am excited about the new car. It handles well, it's the color I wanted, I got a good deal on it. But I'm definitely dealing with some residual feelings about leaving my old car behind, which I why I thought I'd take the time to type them out for myself.
My old car was a 2007 Saturn Ion II, "storm grey". I got it in 2010 (picked up on 5/25/10, to be precise), when I was 19 years old. It was the first car that was ever "mine" and I racked up a number of miles in the time I had it(started at 38k, ended at 92k). There are a lot of things I could say about this particular car -- maybe I'll dive into those later in this post.
I bought the new car in Tewksbury, about 30 miles outside Boston. As Steve and I were heading out to go pick it up today, I told him that I was going to be a little sad to see the Saturn go. I mean, I've had it for 8.5 years and I've spent hours driving it. I made the realization earlier this week that virtually anywhere I've driven since 2010 has been in this car. Back and forth from college, to doctor appointments, out to visit friends, weekend trips, making the move up to Boston. I said to Steve that I recognized that my car is a thing and not an "entity"... but it's hard to feel like I didn't form some kind of relationship or attachment to it while I had it. Steve's response was that change is just hard, in general. I guess that's probably fair. I've always gotten at least a little bit emotional when moving out of an apartment, for example, even if I was more than ready to ditch the place.
Sadness aside, I handed over the keys and the title when we got to the dealership, and it was fine.
But now I think I'm feeling the emotion I expected to come out when I left the car on the lot. We've got some gnarly weather here tonight: bitterly cold, windy, snowy. And a ridiculous thought crossed my mind as I stared out my living room window at the white-out: my car, which spent 10 of its 13 years wearing PA plates, is now sitting naked in the snow on a lot in a rural-ish town in northern MA.
Yes, I recognize this is a slightly ridiculous thought. Of course I know that my car doesn't have "feelings" and that it's not sitting there like an abandoned puppy. And naturally my car doesn't have any hangups about what state it lives in. But in the moment, it seemed easier to try to justify that the car would probably be getting new parts and cleaned up before eventually finding its way to a new owner (or at least auction), rather than try to reason to myself that any guilt or emotion I was feeling was mine alone.
When I was in undergrad, I spent two semesters studying abroad in Chile. I loved most of my time there and even briefly (soooo briefly -- it was pretty clear the practicality of the situation was low) considered moving there after college. For a long time (we're talking a minimum of, idk, 4 years) after I finished my second semester and flew back to the US, I would feel a bit of a pang in my stomach every time I looked at the pictures. A sort of heavy sensation in my gut -- part nostalgia, part sadness, part jealousy of anyone else who got to do the same study abroad program after I left. It took me a long time to process those feelings, and to come to terms with the fact that I am unlikely to *ever* live abroad anywhere for an extended period like that again. Why couldn't I have lived in Chile, becoming ever more fluent in Spanish and living out my dream?
Why? Because, as I abruptly realized at some point fairly recently, I was not just in love with Chile. I was in love with an extended experience I had wherein I had a virtually instantaneous group of friends who were also experiencing a brand new country and culture at the same time as me. Don't get me wrong, Chile is a wonderful place and I hope to have the opportunity to take a trip back at some point. But if I had moved there after college, I would have needed to find a job, handle repayment of US student loans, navigate finding a home, stumble through extensive bureaucracy to figure out visa things, etc. I wouldn't have had an instantaneous friend group, and my family would have been 5000 miles away. It would have been hard. (Not that I'm saying I couldn't have navigated my way through that scenario, because I'm sure I could have... just highlighting that in retrospect, my expectation vs. probable reality did not match up.)
As we return to the main theme of this post, I think the same sort of thing may be happening here. Is my emotional reaction part of trying to say goodbye to a significant time in my life? Would I be going out on a limb to posit that age comes into it too? I mean, I'm 28, and the old car kind of encapsulated my formative young adult years. Not that 28 is old, but it's a little hard to admit to myself that I am an adult adult these days.
The Saturn saw me through a year and a half of my relationship with Zach. It took me between Mechanicsburg and Ithaca a minimum of 35 times -- and that was just while I was actually a student! This car drove me to some concerts: Saving Abel in Jim Thorpe, Rev Theory in Scranton (yikes, what a mess that was the day after). It drove me on trips to visit Liz in Rochester and went on my first road trip into Canada. I took it to Shippensburg to visit Alan a couple of times. It spent many hours parked at the curb of friends' houses, drove me to and from work a gazillion times, earned me compliments about being the girl with the "new car" (it wasn't that new at the time, and those comments for suuuuure dropped off years ago). It saw me meet Steve for the first time in Maryland, go to the beach at Spring Lake, NJ, visit Steve's sister in Philadelphia. We went hiking at Colonel Denning... and then repeated the experience, two years later.
This car saw me through my move to Boston in 2015. It's made that journey about 20 times, round trip. While I've lived in Massachusetts, it's taken me on stressful car rides as I learned the roads around here (spoiler: I still largely haven't... or so I feel every time I need to drive somewhere new). It's taken me on day and weekend trips to Providence, fruit picking in Harvard, MA, the state fair in Springfield, that liqueur place in Hartford, across the border into Albany, NY, back to the Finger Lakes, up to Maine a couple of times, up to the far north into rural Vermont, and most notably, took me on a week-long road trip across New York state, up into the Alexandria Bay area, over into Canada, west to Toronto, down to Niagara Falls (the traffic, eek), back across the US border into the single worst rainstorm of my life, then east across NYS to home.
The AC in it broke at the end of last summer. One day I got in my car, started it up, and heard a mysterious hissing sound. As I park in an underground garage, I assumed the sound was my radio failing to pick up a radio station... until I got onto the road, fiddled with things, and suddenly realized the AC was not blowing cold air. Just... ambient temperature air. It was August at the time, so the timing wasn't ideal, but given that I generally am not running on a strict date/time schedule when I use my car, it wasn't a huge deal. 90 degree day? Guess groceries can wait for a cooler time. The only time it was really and truly miserable was driving back to Boston from PA at the end of Labor Day weekend. On the trip down, it had been maybe 70 degrees, so it was really pretty manageable without AC. On the trip back, however, it was a 95+ degree day and HUMID. I kept waiting for things to cool off once the sun went down, but the joke was on me... 9 PM at night, and it was still 87 degrees with a dew point in the mid 70's. That was an excruciating 8 hour drive home, and I was direly in need of a shower when I finally got home.
The AC is really what spurred the whole "new car" thing. It's hard to justify the notion of replacing AC in a vehicle that's been registered since 2006. I didn't even get the problem diagnosed, because I wasn't sure I even wanted to have to make the call whether to repair or not. Above 90,000 miles, I was starting to feel like I was driving a ticking time bomb -- when will it go off, and what will it take with it? On bad stretches of highway, my paranoia was always that my tires or suspension were attributable and not just the quality of the pavement. Adding to my concern, I've always felt like getting my car inspected in MA has been more of a formality than a car-vetting process. Clean inspection sheet: did they pass me because everything looks good and is in working order? Or because the criteria they're working off of are lax? In PA, I always got a list of things that needed to be addressed at some point, whether at the time of inspection or down the road. While I appreciate that the garage in MA doesn't seem to want to upsell me on repairs I don't need, it has made me wonder if there's things they're just not telling me.
All of this rambling aside... I guess I could consider this the start of a new chapter in my life. Maybe a good road trip is in order to break in the new car...
I bought a new car over the weekend. I picked it up today, and traded in my old car at the same time. New car, super exciting! Right? Well...
I am excited about the new car. It handles well, it's the color I wanted, I got a good deal on it. But I'm definitely dealing with some residual feelings about leaving my old car behind, which I why I thought I'd take the time to type them out for myself.
My old car was a 2007 Saturn Ion II, "storm grey". I got it in 2010 (picked up on 5/25/10, to be precise), when I was 19 years old. It was the first car that was ever "mine" and I racked up a number of miles in the time I had it(started at 38k, ended at 92k). There are a lot of things I could say about this particular car -- maybe I'll dive into those later in this post.
I bought the new car in Tewksbury, about 30 miles outside Boston. As Steve and I were heading out to go pick it up today, I told him that I was going to be a little sad to see the Saturn go. I mean, I've had it for 8.5 years and I've spent hours driving it. I made the realization earlier this week that virtually anywhere I've driven since 2010 has been in this car. Back and forth from college, to doctor appointments, out to visit friends, weekend trips, making the move up to Boston. I said to Steve that I recognized that my car is a thing and not an "entity"... but it's hard to feel like I didn't form some kind of relationship or attachment to it while I had it. Steve's response was that change is just hard, in general. I guess that's probably fair. I've always gotten at least a little bit emotional when moving out of an apartment, for example, even if I was more than ready to ditch the place.
Sadness aside, I handed over the keys and the title when we got to the dealership, and it was fine.
But now I think I'm feeling the emotion I expected to come out when I left the car on the lot. We've got some gnarly weather here tonight: bitterly cold, windy, snowy. And a ridiculous thought crossed my mind as I stared out my living room window at the white-out: my car, which spent 10 of its 13 years wearing PA plates, is now sitting naked in the snow on a lot in a rural-ish town in northern MA.
Yes, I recognize this is a slightly ridiculous thought. Of course I know that my car doesn't have "feelings" and that it's not sitting there like an abandoned puppy. And naturally my car doesn't have any hangups about what state it lives in. But in the moment, it seemed easier to try to justify that the car would probably be getting new parts and cleaned up before eventually finding its way to a new owner (or at least auction), rather than try to reason to myself that any guilt or emotion I was feeling was mine alone.
When I was in undergrad, I spent two semesters studying abroad in Chile. I loved most of my time there and even briefly (soooo briefly -- it was pretty clear the practicality of the situation was low) considered moving there after college. For a long time (we're talking a minimum of, idk, 4 years) after I finished my second semester and flew back to the US, I would feel a bit of a pang in my stomach every time I looked at the pictures. A sort of heavy sensation in my gut -- part nostalgia, part sadness, part jealousy of anyone else who got to do the same study abroad program after I left. It took me a long time to process those feelings, and to come to terms with the fact that I am unlikely to *ever* live abroad anywhere for an extended period like that again. Why couldn't I have lived in Chile, becoming ever more fluent in Spanish and living out my dream?
Why? Because, as I abruptly realized at some point fairly recently, I was not just in love with Chile. I was in love with an extended experience I had wherein I had a virtually instantaneous group of friends who were also experiencing a brand new country and culture at the same time as me. Don't get me wrong, Chile is a wonderful place and I hope to have the opportunity to take a trip back at some point. But if I had moved there after college, I would have needed to find a job, handle repayment of US student loans, navigate finding a home, stumble through extensive bureaucracy to figure out visa things, etc. I wouldn't have had an instantaneous friend group, and my family would have been 5000 miles away. It would have been hard. (Not that I'm saying I couldn't have navigated my way through that scenario, because I'm sure I could have... just highlighting that in retrospect, my expectation vs. probable reality did not match up.)
As we return to the main theme of this post, I think the same sort of thing may be happening here. Is my emotional reaction part of trying to say goodbye to a significant time in my life? Would I be going out on a limb to posit that age comes into it too? I mean, I'm 28, and the old car kind of encapsulated my formative young adult years. Not that 28 is old, but it's a little hard to admit to myself that I am an adult adult these days.
The Saturn saw me through a year and a half of my relationship with Zach. It took me between Mechanicsburg and Ithaca a minimum of 35 times -- and that was just while I was actually a student! This car drove me to some concerts: Saving Abel in Jim Thorpe, Rev Theory in Scranton (yikes, what a mess that was the day after). It drove me on trips to visit Liz in Rochester and went on my first road trip into Canada. I took it to Shippensburg to visit Alan a couple of times. It spent many hours parked at the curb of friends' houses, drove me to and from work a gazillion times, earned me compliments about being the girl with the "new car" (it wasn't that new at the time, and those comments for suuuuure dropped off years ago). It saw me meet Steve for the first time in Maryland, go to the beach at Spring Lake, NJ, visit Steve's sister in Philadelphia. We went hiking at Colonel Denning... and then repeated the experience, two years later.
This car saw me through my move to Boston in 2015. It's made that journey about 20 times, round trip. While I've lived in Massachusetts, it's taken me on stressful car rides as I learned the roads around here (spoiler: I still largely haven't... or so I feel every time I need to drive somewhere new). It's taken me on day and weekend trips to Providence, fruit picking in Harvard, MA, the state fair in Springfield, that liqueur place in Hartford, across the border into Albany, NY, back to the Finger Lakes, up to Maine a couple of times, up to the far north into rural Vermont, and most notably, took me on a week-long road trip across New York state, up into the Alexandria Bay area, over into Canada, west to Toronto, down to Niagara Falls (the traffic, eek), back across the US border into the single worst rainstorm of my life, then east across NYS to home.
The AC in it broke at the end of last summer. One day I got in my car, started it up, and heard a mysterious hissing sound. As I park in an underground garage, I assumed the sound was my radio failing to pick up a radio station... until I got onto the road, fiddled with things, and suddenly realized the AC was not blowing cold air. Just... ambient temperature air. It was August at the time, so the timing wasn't ideal, but given that I generally am not running on a strict date/time schedule when I use my car, it wasn't a huge deal. 90 degree day? Guess groceries can wait for a cooler time. The only time it was really and truly miserable was driving back to Boston from PA at the end of Labor Day weekend. On the trip down, it had been maybe 70 degrees, so it was really pretty manageable without AC. On the trip back, however, it was a 95+ degree day and HUMID. I kept waiting for things to cool off once the sun went down, but the joke was on me... 9 PM at night, and it was still 87 degrees with a dew point in the mid 70's. That was an excruciating 8 hour drive home, and I was direly in need of a shower when I finally got home.
The AC is really what spurred the whole "new car" thing. It's hard to justify the notion of replacing AC in a vehicle that's been registered since 2006. I didn't even get the problem diagnosed, because I wasn't sure I even wanted to have to make the call whether to repair or not. Above 90,000 miles, I was starting to feel like I was driving a ticking time bomb -- when will it go off, and what will it take with it? On bad stretches of highway, my paranoia was always that my tires or suspension were attributable and not just the quality of the pavement. Adding to my concern, I've always felt like getting my car inspected in MA has been more of a formality than a car-vetting process. Clean inspection sheet: did they pass me because everything looks good and is in working order? Or because the criteria they're working off of are lax? In PA, I always got a list of things that needed to be addressed at some point, whether at the time of inspection or down the road. While I appreciate that the garage in MA doesn't seem to want to upsell me on repairs I don't need, it has made me wonder if there's things they're just not telling me.
All of this rambling aside... I guess I could consider this the start of a new chapter in my life. Maybe a good road trip is in order to break in the new car...