tonight i have been contemplating a number of topics for this long-awaited blog -- what shall it be? what shall it become? let's weigh the options:

there's eating ice cream out of a 60ft gutter, or not so interesting details about my job at barnes & noble, or there's the mild hangover i have today from the shots of goldschlager that i did last night with les and richard down in la jolla while keith was doing his best to perform a Cajun Hot Stick with his girlfriend in the adjoining room, or there's the padres mediocre play this month after having a horrendous june, or the fact i got a new bike so that i can go on sweet bike rides around vista with les, or that i saw Land of the Dead -- and it was awesome!, or that i get to work the Harry Potter night next friday night and i'm excited.... but now there's what i'm actually going to write about: i present to you, for your readerly (and my writerly) edification (yes, catch that whiff of Barthes, Kat, it's delightfully smelly):

The Moste Lamentable and Humourfull Storie of Eriks Car

see, i've always had a complex and often aggravating relationship with my car. if you've never seen it -- it's a 1991 Celica convertible with a driver's side door that has a different VIN from the rest of the vehicle, it's an interminably hood-faded, fake backseat designed contraption with roughly three redeeming features. the first is that it's a convertible, and i must admit that driving around on a beautiful summer day with air flowing all around you is a great feeling. the second is that by being so low to the ground, i can take turns on windy backroads at high speeds and it hugs them beautifully. the third is that the car is from that brief era in the late 80's and first year or two of the 90's in which flip up headlights were not only considered a great feat of engineering, but undeniably stylish as well. i dig their archaic charm. ahh, and so you must be asking yourselves now, why would anyone not love such a car? well, the celica, and this celica in particular, is what no one by any stretch of the imagination might consider cool. it's red. it's cute. it's a car for a teenage girl or a middle aged gay man who yearns for the stylish class that he can't quite manage... thus, since the time i've had the car, it has played upon some of my pesky insecurities: i've never considered myself cool, but that hasn't bothered me--what bothers me is that my car is like the car of a person who wants desperately to be cool, but will never quite achieve that general social acknowledgment, and therefore seems only absurd, pathetically comical, in short a person that i don't want to be seen as, perhaps because i really was that person for a time in my life. and oh! the redness! see i disliked red long before i was a golden bear, but my time at Cal has transformed what was a general indifference tinged with mild distate into a real disgust. i shudder sometimes when i'm driving it, especially when i'm wearing my berkeley gear. the christmas after i received the car from my parents, they gave me the present of a paint job (i wanted the car to be a darker blue color), but we never figured out a good time to get it into the shop once school started back up, and then it was the summer before heading to college and i wasn't going to be taking the car up north (it wouldn't even make it up north), so a paint job seemed gratuitous. it still is, but i wouldn't mind the old toyota nearly as much if it were blue.

there's also the issue of the thousands of dollars drawn towards the event horizon that is my red future junker, the thousands of dollars that could have been used to just initially buy a better vehicle, the tape deck that still has the special mix tape that my friend made locked in its jaws (i never even got to hear it), the speakers that used to fritz out every once in a while but now no longer function at all (i talk to myself while driving. or sing in fake italian. or freestyle rap about things i see), how the car would suddenly lose power while i was driving, or how you can't see through the crappy plastic that horribly fails at being a rear window.

but, there is one thing that i have forgot. one thing that almost makes the rest bearable. you can fly a mean kite out of the back. weeee!