New Car Drama

So by now, almost everyone who reads this knows all or a part of the following story. I’d meant to put it up a while back, and just never got around to it.

So way back in July, I’m sitting around my house, doing absolutely nothing of note. After getting back from Europe, I fell into a bit of a rut. It’s that same rut that most of us fell into after graduating college for the first time, especially if we didn’t already have a job in our lives. You wake up, you force yourself to send your resume out to a few job openings, but you don’t actually make the kind of serious effort you know you should. You sleep late, because there’s nowhere you have to be and nothing you have to do at any particular time of the day, and life just doesn’t feel like it used to.

Sooner or later, of course, we have to break out of that funk and rejoin the world. My emergence from said state was supposed to come one morning in late July when my boss from HR Block called me and explained that, after weeks of delays, the background and credit check, newly instituted for all returning employees, had finally come back and I was given the green light to return to work. Happy to finally have an excuse to leave the house, I hopped in my car and started to drive.

About fifteen minutes later, the front left corner of my car was a twisted metal heap, and a very polite lady had a nasty gash down the side of her truck. I had turned right on a red, thinking the way was clear. This was the first time in my life I’d had this kind of experience, but I had a vague idea of what needed to be done. Both our cars were still in drivable condition, so we moved to a parking lot, called the police, and exchanged insurance information.

Now, the precise nature of the accident is still somewhat unclear to me. To my recollection, I had finished my turn and was well into perpendicular street by the time the impact occurred, which would mean that the other driver had to be changing lanes to side swipe me like that. Supporting this version of events is the fact that treadmarks could be found two car lengths beyond the intersection. Also, my front headlight popped forward and out, rather than caving into the car as one might expect from a head-on collision.

The claims adjustor, however, felt that a sideswipe would have caused a different shape of dent on the other car, and felt that my headlight might have been popped out because metal behind it was twisted in the accident, forcing it forward. Long story short, I’m out a car and a $125 ticket.

So I’m driving my busted up car around, not sure how long it’ll keep running. Our mechanic said it was safe to drive for a little while, but that we needed to repair or replace the car soon. The repair job would have involved very expensive body work, and the car has been breaking down on my every couple of months anyway, so it was pretty clear that a new car was the more fiscally sound option. So I start doing some research.

Next thing I know, before I’ve even had a chance to settle on what kind of car I might like to be looking at, I find out that my mom went out looking and got talked into buying a used Honda Accord, year 2004, from a local dealer. The salesman had somehow so convinced her of the need to buy the car immediately that she did not even consult me before making the purchase. She just wrote the guy a check, expecting me to pay her back when I could.

Now, on the one hand, hey new car. I mean, I had a big problem, and supermom just swooped in and solved it for me before I even got my head around just how big a problem it was. On the other hand, now I’m committed to ultimately paying for a car I’ve never even laid eyes on. I don’t for a moment doubt the purity of her intentions, but seriously, boundaries?

As it turns out, the Honda Accord does actually fit me like a glove. I drive it to stl, and it just feels right. It’s only slightly larger than my old Sable, and it has a smaller engine (my old car was a 6 cylinder, this is a 4) but it handles beautifully. Also, I never knew how awesome it would be to have stereo buttons on my steering wheel. I know that sounds like one of the last things you should car about in a multi-thousand dollar investment, but dude, I liked that.

The next chapter in the story almost everyone has already heard. The car gets me to stl just fine, and also gets me to my interview. Then, on the ride home, it gets as far as the end of highway 40 before the engine cuts out. So right there, merging onto I-70, I lose everything. Power steering cuts out, and my speed starts dropping like a stone. What’s worse, I’m still getting used to the car, and I don’t know where the button for the hazard lights are. I flip my turn signals one and off and wave my hands frantically, hoping that anyone behind me will come to the conclusion that I’m having car trouble. Or that I’m insane, but either way they better slow down. I manage to get my car safely to the side of the road.

About an hour or so later, Adam is picking me up from the Honda dealer off highway 40. Ironically, his car is having trouble too, all of the sudden, but it does at least get us back to his place before it starts to crap out. I make the most of my extra time in stl, and by the end of the day the dealer calls me back with new information: there was no oil in the car.

They oil the car up (that sounds dirty…) and I drive it back towards Kansas City. I stop in Kingdom City to check the oil again, and sure enough, it’s already running low. Something is wrong with the engine, and it’s either leaking or burning through the oil at a prodigal rate. I top it off, and drive it the rest of the way home, at which point it once again is running low on oil. The local dealer takes it back, tries to fix it, and determines that the only solution is to completely replace the engine.

I should mention at this point that since I’m working way out in downtown Kansas City and the dealer is near my house in Overland Park, and because I’d just taken a bunch of time off work to go to St Louis, I wasn’t actually able to physically go to the dealer’s lot to handle any of this. It was all done through phone calls, and any in-person interactions had to be done with my parents, who live and work like 5 minutes from the place.

So anyway, just as I’m starting to think “yay, new engine” I get a call from my mom wanting me to leave work early and look at a Toyota Corola. WTF! What happened to a new engine in my Accord? So I get down there, more than a little irate at this point, and then I learn that the engine they wanted to give me was a used one, and they couldn’t even tell us how many miles was on it or how long it had been in service. Another WTF! So my mom has been talking about this Toyota Corola, and we have to choose between it and a much more expensive 2007 Honda Accord. The dealer is offering to let us buy another car off the lot and put the money we’ve already given them towards it, but they haven’t offered anything more, and I need a car sooner than a lawyer will get all this sorted out, even if it did all go in my favor. So I take the deal, and we leave the lot, planning to file all the paperwork the next day.

Over the next 24 hours, however, we pull up the Corola’s specs on the dealer’s website, and find some things that the dealer neglected to mention. In particular, there is no anti-lock breaking system. At this point, abbreviated bastardizations of the English language no longer suffice. What. The. FUCK!

Back to the dealer, and now we have only two options. Select a substantially more expensive 2007 Honda Accord, or go get a lawyer. So the good news is that the third time seems to have been the charm, as my new new new car really is fun to drive and handles well. The bad news, however, is that it cost us a lot more than we were expecting to spend, and we probably got screwed on the price since the dealer knew we didn’t really want to go to a lawyer over this. The salesman himself, at least, seemed to genuinely feel bad, and he agreed to sell us the 3-year, bumper-to-bumper warranty at cost. At least, he said it was cost…

If anything goes wrong with this one, I will write a very nasty letter. And possibly commit murder.

Christianity Evolving?

Mothers of Christian teenagers, beware. According to a new study, it is possible that your child just thinks God wants them to feel good about themselves, and try to be good people.

Aparrently, an "impostor" to proper Christianity has risen up, which the study calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." According to this study, teens across the country say they are Christians, believe they are Christians, but in reality, they "that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good." Scandalous!

The study goes on to complain that teenagers are indifferent and inarticulate about their faith, and that while they seem to believe in God, they don't have a drive to make others do so. Kenda Creasy Dean, author of "Almost Christian," has become a self-appointed crusader to raise awareness about this new horrible threat to our children. She particularly raises concern that teenagers are "inarticulate" about their faith. She raises several other points, which if you want to know more about you can view the CNN article here or perhaps her book, but from what I gleaned after reading the former was that her argument basically boils down to the following statement:

Many teens are practicing a religion that motivates them to be kind, compassionate, and willing to help other people. It has moved them to volunteer their time at various charities, treat others with respect, and generally be more self-aware with regards to their own adherence to a moral code. However, they are losing the dogma and specific rules that really make Christianity what it is. They aren't "witnessing" to spread their faith to others. They're even skipping church! We need to stop the proliferation of this pretender to the throne!

And an article detailing this "threat" made the front page of cnn.com

The good news is that if the study can be believed, this "pretender religion" is actually the dominant form of worship among American teens. If that's true, I think there's hope for this country yet.

Scott Pilgrim and the Seven Deadly Metaphors

So I just got back from seeing Scott Pilgrim, and my sides are still hurting a little. This was honestly the best movie I’ve seen in the last couple of years.

For the unaware, the basic premise of Scott Pilgrim Vs The Word is as follows: Scott Pilgrim is an unemployed hipster living in Canada with his gay roommate who pretty much carries his sorry ass financially. He has recently started dating a Japanese school girl, is in a band that nobody likes or has heard of, and his life is going nowhere. Then he meets Ramona. Ramona is the physical embodiment of nerdy chic. Funky anime style hair that changes colors on a weekly basis, an outfit that captures the aesthetic that Hot Topic was always going for but never quite reached, a general lack of insipidness, and an inexplicable willingness to let Scott mope his way into a date with her. However, now that he is dating her, he must defeat her Seven Evil Exes in a variety of duels to the death.

The movie takes place in a sort of alternate reality, where life regularly imitates video games: people will randomly acquire superpowers, health bars and power-ups are commonplace, and Scott actually acquires visible points as he progresses through the story. Everybody seems to find this perfectly natural; in fact, when the first evil ex is defeated and explodes in a shower of coins, the only shock that Scott Pilgrim exhibits regarding this phenomenon is that it’s not enough to cover his bus fare home. The movie is full of 8-bit sound effects, needlessly intense voiceovers, and enough arcade style lights and noises to… man, I swear I had something for this… well, it’s a lot of lights and noises, OK? Basically, the movie is wrapped in a glossy coat of exactly what its target audience of underdeveloped manchildren want to see: an environment in which the cartoonish preoccupations of our youth are not only accepted but commonplace in adult society, but are now mixed with the kind of mature themes that we weren’t allowed to know about back in those days. In other words, it’s a world where nobody had to grow up, get a job, or actually mature as a person, but still got to move out of their parents’ houses, get girlfriends, and do all that awesome stuff that the big people get to do.

There’s one gigantic twist to all of this, however: the entire core concept of the movie is that people who honestly want to see all that need to grow the fuck up. Just in case this wasn’t glaringly obvious by the constant use of the video-game style boss fights as a metaphor for Scott dealing with his own emotional baggage, the movie literally spells it out for us in big flashing letters more than once. Despite the fact that there’s a lot going on in this movie, they spend the first twenty minutes or so getting you to absolutely despise the main character, so that the next hour and a half can be spent developing him from a hopeless, self-conscious loser into a remotely likable human being.

The video-game aesthetic, while being an absolute blast to watch, in is in fact an extended metaphor for how a lot of the target audience needs to get over themselves and grow up a little. It’s like I went to a strip club, and a gorgeous naked woman stepped out and delivered a truly compelling dissertation on how objectification of women was harmful for my sexual development.

Scott Pilgrim is a movie that works on several different levels. As a simple, mindless comedy, there is more than enough good humor to make it a satisfactory comedy. The fight scenes are surprisingly well-choreographed, so long as the arcade-style aesthetic isn’t a turn-off for you. That aesthetic itself is a hilarious non-sequitor, made all the funnier by the fact that the movie is kind of making fun of your for liking it so readily. But on top of all of that, the movie is telling the story of a shy, emotionally stunted nerd finally getting over his own BS and becoming an adult nerd with a girlfriend. And just to remind the audience that this bit of mockery is all in good fun, he levels up when he does so.

L8er H8ers

With apologies for the headline.

In San Francisco today, Chief US District Judge Vuaghn Walker officially overturned the controversial Proposition 8. For those of you with short attention spans, Prop 8 was the gay marriage ban enacted in California during the 2008 elections.

"Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license," Walker wrote in his decision. "Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.

-excerpt from CNN

The campaign to pass Proposition 8 featured every dirty political trick from rhetoric to outright lies. It was better funded than any political campaign for a social issue in our nation’s history. It was a mar on the reputation for fairness and tolerance that America has prided itself on for generations, and although I am not gay, I am ecstatic to hear of its defeat, however temporary.

Because it is expected that a higher court will rule on this, the matter effectively remains undecided, and so the Judge has ruled that the ban will continue to hold until the appeals process is concluded- a process that may very well wind up in the Supreme Court in the not-too-distant future.

That’s right, there is a strong likelihood that the Supreme Court will be forced to decide whether homosexuality is a protected status under the 14th amendment before our next presidential election.

In other words, depending on how a certain other popular-vote initiative pans out in November, California may be giving rise to two potentially epic Supreme Court issues before Christmas.

And as an interesting aside: in the corner of gay rights during this legislative smackdown is the unlikely tag-team of David Boies and former US Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the lawyers that represented Al Gore and George Bush in the 2002 elections, respectively. The law guy that the Democrats turned to in hopes of winning the presidency and the man that the Republicans turned to for the same are working together on this. It’s like when Lex Luthor teamed up with Superman to fight Darkseid.


But political fanboying aside, today made me happy. It’s a reminder that while we still have an abundance of grossly ignorant, intolerant jackasses in our country, there’s still a strong contingent of sensible people willing to push back. A certain somebody would be very quick to remind me of how ridiculous I sound when I get on my political high horse, but this is one position that I don’t mind looking silly over.