For the past five years, I have not
owned a car.
There is no way of telling this fact to a person without inspiring some sort of association – good or
bad.
“You must really care about the environment.”
“You must
be a hardcore biker.”
“You must have, like, eight DUI’s.”
I heard that last one on a first date.
And like anyone falsely accused, I denied it nine too many times –
only making my guilt seem that much more plausible.
For the record, I have never had a DUI.
Never. I swear!
There’s no way around the
associations people make when you tell them you don’t own a car.
It’s particularly American to define a person by the consumer
products he or she owns. But even when someone compliments me, I
can’t help but feel like a fraud. I get uneasy when someone tells
me how awesome they think it is that I am fighting against America’s
love affair with cars, doing right by the environment. I mean, trees are cool, but I don’t feel like I’m doing anything
revolutionary by walking my groceries home.
I just ride the bus. No big
deal.
“Oh how ‘Rosa Parks’ of you!”
“I thought only poor people rode the
bus?”
“That sucks”
See?
* * *
I really love this bad-ass Georgia
O’Keeffe quote, where she says in the most perfectly blunt way that men are all missing
the point of her art by associating it with traditional notions of
femininity:
“I made you take time to look at what
I saw and when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all
your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my
flower as if I think and see what you think and see – and I
don’t.”1
This is how I feel anytime
someone makes any statement about me not owning a car. I just don't see anything out of the ordinary about it. However, unlike
O’Keeffe who had personal meaning behind her flowers and made a lasting impression on the world, I don’t
have any important reason for being a full-time pedestrian. I just walk a lot.
The main
reason I don’t own a car is because I was really poor at the time.
When a guy ran into my car with his van and totaled it, I figured it
would be smart to use the insurance money to pay down my student
loans. I'm no hero. I'm not a bum. I'm just cheap, actually.
* * *
It seems counterproductive to argue
that I don’t care about not owning a car by writing a blog post
about not owning a car. By putting a spotlight on how much I don't care about this issue, I'm putting a spotlight on how much I care about this issue. And we all know by now that social media is just an outlet for our own vanity anyway.
Every article I've read about how our social
media personas are nothing like our real-life personas exudes such an
air of superiority and condensation it just reveals complex on top of
complex. I don’t need some smug blogger to tell me the real reason
why I’m posting instagram pictures of my fancy dinner on facebook –
I know damn well why I’m posting those pictures. I’m smug as shit about it and I want other people to know!
And I’d bet a dollar (fuck, I’d bet
two dollars) that everyone who has ever written about the
“truth” behind social media has posted something for the sake of
their ego at some point.
FACT: those authors were stroking
their own egos when they wrote the damn piece – telling us how
super smart they were to see past the superficiality of it all.
Two dollars, please.
FACT: I’m
stroking my own ego right now by telling you about those authors telling us about the superficiality of it all.
Complex
on top of complex
on top of complex
We’re not all journalists. We’re
human beings. We want the world to think we’re cool, interesting people worthy of love and friendship – and
sometimes that takes a little creativity - a stretch of the truth here and there. But when I write these
blog posts, I hope you know that I am trying to be sincere, fuck-words and all. I would call these posts “investigative reports into my psyche” if I didn’t
think that phrase sounded ridiculous. So believe me when I say that
not having a car for the past five years has never really bothered
me.
And believe me when I say that when my mom signs the title to her old car over to me on Sunday, I am not going to feel like myself.
1
Joan Didion, The White Album
