Tag Archives: car

May 20, 2010 · 3:00 AM

C U Soon

I am not proud of this, but I have my DVR set to record only two shows.

Brace yourself.

One is The Real Housewives of New York (gasp!).

The other is Oprah (shudder).

For inexplicable reasons, I’m actually more embarrassed to be associated with Oprah.  The Real Housewives series is the most fantastic reality show on television, and allows me to indulge in my “mid-week uptown apartment/weekend Hampton’s beach house” fantasy.  Of course, the women are despicable and immature, but that only serves to stroke my moral superiority. 

See?  It’s the best show on television!

Oprah on the other hand, makes me feel like a stay-at-home mom who has never heard of real news and has no connection with the outside world other than through this billionaire talk show host.  If I’m ever watching Oprah and Mike comes home from work, I’m instantly inclined to change the channel out of sheer humiliation.  It’s as if he’s just caught me singing into my hairbrush in front of the bathroom mirror.

One could understand my dilemma recently when Oprah started a “No Phone Zone” campaign in an effort to get people to stop texting and driving.  Ask anyone (especially Mike) and they will say that texting and driving is one of my biggest issues.  It’s about the only thing that turns me into a total policing mother around my spouse, friends and family. 

Driving drunk and texting behind the wheel are the exact same thing to me.  Texting might even be worse because your eyes aren’t even on the road.

But now that Oprah has championed the agenda and called it her own, I don’t want to say two words about it.  It makes me feel like one of those sycophantic Oprah worshippers who blindly take on issues just because Ms. O said to.

I just realized that I am insulting Oprah-lovers.  I am sorry.  Just remember the line between love and hate is incredibly thin; look at me DVRing her every day.  Such a hypocrite.

One may wonder why I bother to record her when I have such loathful feelings toward her.  It’s simple: the celebrities.  No one gets the interviews Oprah gets.  Who did Reille Hunter sit down with in her home?  Who does Bono visit when he comes to the States?   Who does Julia Roberts tell the sex of her unborn babies to?

My point exactly.

Luckily, Oprah is not the only one taking up the texting battle.  A far more genius anti-texting advertising campaign in Seattle is run by none other than a funeral home.

This is on the back of metro buses all across the Seattle area and I have one thing to say:  YES.

I love the shamelessness, the offensive nature.

But I also love that it makes its point painfully clear — your life is at stake.  It is not worth it to text and drive.

Whew.  I feel a lot better having said that completely apart from any Oprah influence. 

But I’m still going to watch her show today.

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August 12, 2009 · 6:00 AM

Single Engine

Next month marks the one-year anniversary of an experiment Mike and I like to call “What would life be like with only one car?”  About nine months into our marriage, we did an assessment of expenses and realized we could save so much cash by just eliminating one car:  gas, insurance, maintenance.  So we put his 2000 Volvo on Craigslist and it sold a day later.

Gulp.  We thought surely it would take several rounds of postings and negotiations to find someone to buy it, so we’d have plenty of time to get used to the idea of being stranded with my darling 2007 Mazda 3 (I call her Ella).  Instead we had two buyers in a bidding war just a day after the ad posted (don’t get me wrong, bidding wars are good when you’re the benefactor).

The buyer drove away after assuring us he would give it a good home, with big fields for it to run around in and lots of children to play with; and with that, we were a single car family.

We had that panicked sellers-remorse almost immediately — what will we DO when we have alternate plans? we shrieked.  How are we supposed to go out to lunch separately at work?  People are going to think we’re NUTS.

And they did.  When we told people (and still to this day) that we only have one car, they looked at us like we didn’t have access to running water or electricity.  But how do you DO it?  they wonder.  It’s simple.

We live in Eastlake, in downtown Seattle.  Mike works in Bellevue, so he drops himself off at work with me beside him, and tra-la-la I hop in the driver’s seat and take myself to work in Redmond.  I have the car all day (this comes with the thrilling bonus of having to run all our errands at lunch since “I have the car”), and then I pick him up on my way home and we speed across 520 in the carpool lane.  Genius!

Or is it?  You can see how this can’t be working perfectly all the time.  Yes, we negotiate on who gets the car and who bums a ride with a friend when we have conflicting plans.  But what about when it’s REALLY not working?

When it’s really not working is when you see Abby standing alone in the Redmond Town Center mall waiting for Mike to finish his golf game.  Yes, people, golf is a five-hour game.  Hmm, what are my life-lines, Regis?  I could phone a friend, see a movie, shop til I drop…yawn.

But that’s half the point.  This one-car situation involves sacrifice.  It’s not always pretty (Mike: “where ARE you, I’ve been standing outside for 15 minutes!”) and we don’t always do it joyfully (cut to the conversation where we sound like brother and sister fighting over the car in high school) — but we do it.  We do it every day.  And little by little as our year has passed we’ve learned a lot about what we can make work.

Being a part of the Millennial generation comes with its own sense of entitlement.   We are babies of an economic boom era; life hasn’t been rough.  So when you’re a DINK riding the urban wave, you think you deserve to have the perfect board.

But that doesn’t mean you should.  At least, not in our case.

Once we had the gaping hole of missing a car, we could see that we had set our quality of life on how convenient we could make the day-to-day.  It’s unthinkable for most people I know to miss an event because of transportation issues.  For us, it’s not frequent, but it is a reality.  We see now how our situation forces us to communicate, to coordinate, and to give where we normally get.

It’s funny; for all of the annoyances and frustrations a single-car life can bring, it’s also pleasantly simple.  It’s one less thing to worry about.  And, as hammy as it sounds, when we eventually buy another car, I’ll miss that extra hour a day with Mike in this one.

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