Top down.

Top down.

I'm borrowing the indefatigably fabulous Greg and Shawna's almost equally fabulous but slightly more fatigable bright yellow convertible VW Karmann Ghia again. This is the second year in a row that I've swapped cars with them to enjoy the sheer summer-ness of the little yellow car.

The downsides are that it's really tough to drive and I'm making more than my fair share of emissions. And that everyone can see me during my almost daily NPR-instigated cry.

I've noticed that my back hurts, not necessarily from the broken seat, but from the fact that I'm always so tense. Maybe it's the fact that I've rolled a car before; maybe it's just the lack of power steering. While I absolutely adore borrowing this car, getting all the attention on the road (not that I'm checking craigslist's missed connections with any more frequency than usual), and feeling the wind blowing gently* through my hair and the sunshine warming my body, I'm kind of glad that there's an end in sight; I have options. I can just pick up my breeze-less car whenever I'm ready.

Allow me to quote an email from John, because it's kind of rare that something he says really makes sense out of context - even seemingly normal phrases will be followed with a dependent clause about robots, vietnamese soup, or manual labor. Anyway, he wrote: "Wow. Summer car. You have nice friends."

I really do have nice friends, and that makes my world go round. Nice friends with nice cars, in fact. It's like living in The Valley in the early 90s without the drugs. Or money. Or smog. Wait, I'm working on the smog, remember?


* = by blowing gently, I mean blasting every errant strand into a permanent knot.