New year, new car. It took a few months, but I finally managed to find both the time and the motivation to buy something that would replace the old Camry, something that perhaps didn't sound like a blender full of gravel. I spent the better part of a day talking with a surprisingly awesome salesman named Carlos at a dealership outside of Atlanta, and I signed a bunch of paperwork. Then I filled it with IKEA furniture and olives from Trader Joe's, and drove it back down to the Boro, and along the way the plastic dealer tag ripped off and sailed down I-16, and no fewer than three kindly men at gas stations approached me to say helpful things like OH, YOU GOT TO GET SOME TAGS ON THIS CAR and IF YOU DON'T GOT TAGS, YOU'RE GONNA GET PULLED OVER, and I nodded and smiled and said Yes, I know, I know, look, if I get pulled over I will just explain the situation and I have all the paperwork on me, and then I finally just smiled, waved, and took my chances.
(When we moved to Madison, we left the Camry behind at Chad's for a few weeks, and I drove the Buick while the B followed in our way-too-large U-Haul. His phone had gone through the laundry the night before, so we had no way of talking to each other, and I was flustered and couldn't stop crying because I didn't want to move, and at one point on the way to the new apartment, I pulled a u-turn and hit a curb and managed to puncture the tire of the Buick. It was a slow leak, but even so, we had no money or any idea where we lived, and a day later the marketing firm called me in for a second interview, and so I dressed up and drove the flat-tire-d Buick, and the whole way there, men in plumber's trucks kept pulling up alongside of me and motioning frantically that my tire was flat, and I would feign surprise and mouth thank you and pretend to pull off until they drove away, at which point I would speed back up because FUCK I NEED THIS JOB I CAN FIX THE TIRE LATER, ONCE I GET THE JOB. I found the building, I interviewed again, I got the job, and then immediately after the interview found a Mobil and crawled all around the car in my nice pencil skirt and blouse with a can of Fix-A-Flat.)
Anyway! I listed the Camry on Craigslist, but there was also a man on there advertising that he wanted a Camry, one without any major mechanical repairs. LOVE CONNECTION, I thought, and promptly wrote him that I had a Camry, albeit one in need of a major mechanical repair, and we danced around Craigslist for a day and then he bought it. The flatbed came and picked up the Camry, and I waved goodbye. So back it goes, to another old man, only this one's going to take it to Naples and let it retire.
In other news, we have been putting together some much-needed furniture (goodbye, Highland couch!) and laughing hysterically whenever the weatherman warns us of the HARD FREEZE that is a comin', and I have been starting books and refusing to finish them, because, hey, let's face it, life is probably too short to spend slogging through historical nonfiction that makes even the French Revolution of 1848 boring.
I have also been thinking a lot about the little elderly Norwegian man who lives in my brain, the one named Sven that says things like I can't believe you only have one job, you should have two and Look at you, thinking you deserve this car and who gets upset whenever I sleep past nine. At Christmas dinner, I told my father that it's taken me years to come to terms that I will never be a runner, that I sort of hate running anything over four miles because it ceases to be enjoyable. He looked surprised. Don't you get it, I said, coming from this family, where everyone runs miles before breakfast, it sort of took me a long time to recognize that it's going to be okay if I never become a distance runner. So now I take walks and the whole time my brain tells me that it's not real exercise, that walking is what fat kids do when they can't run the President's Challenge.
And as I said it, I realized that it wasn't my father who cared if I ran or not--after all, the man himself gave up running for the sake of his knees a few years back--but Sven. Sven thinks even running is for pussies because it's not real work! Sven thinks you should get up in the icy dark of the morning, splash some water on your face, and head out to chop firewood so that you can heat up a thoroughly nutritious and tasteless breakfast of oats you steel-cut! Sven has been known to indulge once a year, on Christmas Eve, with a piece of reindeer jerky he killed and cured himself! Sven knows that if you don't smell like wet wool all the time, you just aren't trying hard enough! I think in this new year, I'm going to try to not listen to Sven. Instead, whenever he gets too sulky because I've slept in, or because we decide to go out for pizza and beer, or we stay up too late to talk around the kitchen table, I'm going to buckle him in the back of the new car, and roll all the windows down, and listen to this song, and drive to the beach.
Happy new 2012, everyone. I think it's going to be a good one.
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