Auto Mechanic

I cry every time I take my car to the mechanic. And I mean EVERY TIME. Okay, maybe not EVERY. TIME. I don’t cry for routine oil changes... unless of course they end up costing me three times what I expected because undoubtedly there is always something else wrong with my car. So I’d say I cry about 92% of the time I take my car into the mechanic. Is this some sort of mark on my personality? A genetic deformity like the one my husband just read about on wikipedia that says if you sneeze due to sunlight, you are uniquely deformed?

I think it’s the stress of paying lots of money to someone in a predominately male field to diagnose and fix a car, something I know very little about, except how to drive it, and my husband would argue me on that point. The mechanic could be pulling the wool over my eyes, but who am I to argue. I don’t know if I need a new air filter. I can’t tell if my brake pads are too thin or my tires too worn. They can show me, and I usually insist. But that actually never proves anything to me one way or the other. So I fork over all the money I have, don’t have and sign away my soul just to get my car back so that in a few months I can go through the process again with some other car part.

Plus, I’m pretty sure that while they are all so nice to me to my face, once they go in back and are working on all the cars, they’re just laughing at how badly they’ve screwed me over. It’s like the squirrels in that one commercial that cause a car accident and high five each other. I’m the auto accident. The auto mechanics are the seemingly innocent squirrels.

Fashion Sucks

In college I had a class with a girl named Fashion. She was pretty, nice and a bit trendy, but that seemed fitting. I also had a neighbor who owned a T-shirt that said "Fashion Sucks." I thought that was funny.

I realize I must be old when I drive across the college campus and see girls dressed in stuff that was the height of fashion back when I was in junior high. Some of it so extreme that I didn’t even wear it back then.

There was about five inches of snow on the ground the other day, it had warmed up from the previous week and was probably in the low thirties and I saw a girl walking to class wearing a short denim skirt, with Capri, lace at the bottom leggings underneath. This was a typical outfit of mine in junior high. But I lived in California, where even in the winter, it was always above 40. Why such extremes for fashion?

I have to laugh when I visit my sister, seven years my senior, and see her wearing Uggs. Uggs that I can remember her begging for at the mall when she was 16. Uggs that looked ridiculous then (even my 9 year old self knew) and look ridiculous now.

It was actually so cold the other day, and I had to wear a skirt, that I actually spoke the words "do they still sell leg warmers?" And for a few seconds I considered trying to hunt some down. I owned leg warmers at age eleven, laughed at them last winter when they were in, and considered wearing them only out of desperation due to a cold, chilling to the bone wind, in a town where I knew no one. But I couldn’t do it. Nor do I think leg warmers are still popular enough to be in stores. Are they?

I can remember being mad that my mom was older, and thus, not so cool in the seventies when seventies day came around at school and I wanted cool hippie clothes to wear. Not to mention the fact that she didn’t save any cool clothes from her youth. But now I realize why. They go out of fashion. So far out that you can’t fathom they would ever be popular again. But here they are. I’m waiting for banana clips and side pony tails, jeans pegged with three pairs of socks on top, and shirts tucked in, bagged out just right and sleeves rolled.

I was driving down the street a couple of months ago and every girl who drove past was wearing those giant, bumble bee eye Jackie O sunglasses. The ones my mom wore in the summer of 1990 when we picked my brother up from his church mission in Japan. The ones we constantly made fun of because in every single picture of my family in that exotic land, my mom’s eyes look like giant black bug eyes. But apparently it’s cool now to dress like my mom.