i am not my car

we have an ancient toyota carina - ancient being from the mid-90s. it has 400,000 odd kilometers on it and it uses the occasional (read: weekly) couplea liters of oil. it's dark, boring grey. it has 2 of 4 hubcaps and we did finally put them both on the same side so that it would at least look more or less ok from at least one side. it has no frills whatsoever. no automatic locks or windows. no power steering. but it gets us where we're going (unless we wanted to drive to italy or spain, it might not like going that far). and with car taxes at 150% in this country, we don't even consider replacing it. we have considered not having a car at all and we didn't when we lived in copenhagen, but the reality of where we live is that it would be pretty difficult to get along without a car.

i normally don't put much thought at all into the car. it's there, it serves its purpose and that's it. that's kinda how i was brought up to think about cars. my dad had a old blue chevette that he kept driving until my sister, at the age of 12 (if you recall) finally put it out of its misery. and i had to take my driver's test in that godawful giant old station wagon named lurch.  my first car was a nondescript american-made (i can't even recall the make/model) two-tone brown sedan. the first remotely cool car i had was a little green mustang named iggy that very quickly revealed that it used more oil than gas. tho' during my aberrant years in southern california i got a little car crazy (the peer pressure oh the peer pressure) due to a boyfriend who happened to have two porsches and my little gold pontiac fiero that perfectly matched my hair, i generally could seriously care less about cars.

so it wasn't until we approached the end station that it occurred to me that the blog campers were going to not only see but get into our ancient toyota so i'd better warn them since they probably were far more car people than i am. we had a laugh about it, especially since they approached from the hubcapless side (i should really have parked the other way) and it seemed even worse. but honestly, i didn't really think more about it, except to use it for comic effect in one of my post blog camp posts.

last weekend, the sister-in-law gave us a bad time about the ancient toyota. husband gazed at it mildly, as if it had only just occurred to him that it was getting rather old. because he cares even less than i do. SIL reported that some friend of hers who had met us remarked that it was quite ironic that we had multiple fancy cameras, iPods and macbooks, plus more than one nintendo DS, but we drove that old rust bucket (for the record, there's very little rust on the car, so that's not an entirely fair characterization). middle child's friend apparently had said the same thing. apparently people can't really reconcile wegner chairs, 3 macs (4 if eldest child is here) and a 42" phillips flat screen t.v. with the ancient toyota.

and it made me realize that it's all a matter of perceptions and priorities. we don't define ourselves by our car. at all. and i realize that a lot of people do and that's ok for them. it's just that we don't. which isn't to be high and mighty and all anti-materialistic, because we do define ourselves by a whole lot of other material symbols. like macs and iPods and nikons and designer chairs and pretty refrigerators. husband stubbornly holds onto a 3-year-old sony-ericsson mobile because he extends his not caring to phones (unlike me, i do obsess care about my iPhone). but don't try to take away his iPod Touch or his iPod Shuffle.

the whole car thing is really only a problem when other people, who define themselves by their car,  judge us by our car, because we're not our car. not at all.