The Next Time You See Me, I'll Have a Car

I'm leaving tomorrow for an epic tour of the East Coast/Midwest, culminating in my triumphant return with my very own car.

Returning a week from Tuesday.

Maybe I'll have some medieval--or even just thinly academic?--content once I'm back into the groove.

Bye, y'all.

I Am Truly An Adult. Well, Half An Adult.

For I am (probably) buying a car. I will take out a tiny little loan and everything.

So why only half an adult?

Because I'm buying it from my dad.

Hell, it makes things easier, and it's a nicer car than I could afford otherwise. Besides, there was seriously like no chance of my ever buying a car unless one fell into my lap like this. I mean really. Didn't I go through this same rigmarole of indecision last spring/summer? And look where it got me: schlepping my ass to the IGA with a canvas bag every weekend and begging airport rides from all and sundry. Not that I'll stop walking--I like walking--but it would be nice to be able to buy milk AND flour AND ice cream in the same trip, rather than determining what I'll eat that week based on the cumulative weight of my groceries.

Things Seem to be Proceeding Apace

Not a lot to report this week. I've been visiting the boyfriend down in the Metropole, so I haven't been able to make any headway on moving stuff--that's probably for the best. It's been good to take some time off from staring at my books and thinking, "Do I really need you? or you? How would I feel without The Mill on the Floss? What if I need to recollect some essential fact about Maggie Tulliver? What will its absence do to Middlemarch, which will then be the lone Eliot on the shelf (Silas Marner having already received the axe)? Oh god, oh god, I don't know if I can give it up!"

For the record, I plan to keep The Mill on the Floss.

The car-purchasing frenzy has also sort of died down. I may still buy my friend's car, but I haven't test-driven it yet, and I'm leaving tomorrow, so that'll have to wait for my next visit. In the meantime, I'm going to look into the possibility of renting a car for an occasional weekend (thanks to Hilaire and Sisyphus for that suggestion!). Once I Crunch the Numbers, I'll have a better sense of whether paying for a car + insurance will really be a good idea.

So what I've been doing, for the last few days at least, is reading some of the stuff on the very end of my survey syllabus. I recently bumped into a friendly acquaintance on campus who'd just finished teaching her first-ever course, and she said that in the future she planned to prepare her last classes of the semester well in advance--ideally before the semester even begins. Because by the end of the semester she found herself just too worn out to thoroughly prep her lectures. Now, I'm not going to go that far; it might turn out to be a waste of time, after all, because presumably the concerns etc. that I'll want to highlight in December will be shaped by what we've done in September through November. But the tail-end of the survey course--which is one of your typical lit surveys, running up to about 1800--is the end that I know least well, and I'd never actually read one of the longer texts that I want to assign. So it seemed highly sensible to take a look at them.

I must say that I'm enjoying this. It reminds me of reading for my comprehensive exams early in grad school, a process that I also much enjoyed. I came across that poem of, um, Cowper's, I think, that's quoted all over To the Lighthouse--you know, "We perished, each alone"--and it was just such a pleasure to finally see what it was that Mr. Ramsay was always mumbling to himself. [It is Cowper; I just checked.] One of the things that I really wanted to get out of grad school was breadth of knowledge, as well as depth; while the dissertation is excellent for promoting depth, breadth sort of gets lost in the shuffle, especially once coursework is over. And, in my grad program at least, I fear that increasing budget cuts will limit the opportunities for reading widely outside of one's stated field even more. Ideally, perhaps, one should see undergrad as the time for reading widely, and grad school as the time to focus; but this isn't terribly practical, I don't think, as I was still developing the critical reading skills that I needed to understand and appreciate a lot of this literature when I was an undergrad. Or rather, I would have understood and appreciated them differently at that time: not inadequately, necessarily, but differently, and in a way that possibly wouldn't have been useful to me in grad school or beyond.

But perhaps the same could be said of my reading now. That is, my understanding of the literature I read for my exams back in '02 or whenever it was might not be terribly useful to me now, and I really ought to go and reread Milton and Spenser and so forth in order to "get them" in a way that's appropriate to my current interests and--for lack of a better term--scholarly "level." And should read them again in another 5 years or so. It's kind of like how, at the end of college, I thought that I'd be better off if I could start it all over: I'd have taken a better range of classes and ultimately gotten more out of my education. But then I realized that, if I could have done so, at the end of Round 2 I very likely would have had the exact same feeling.

Luckily for me, however, I'll have to read bits of both Milton and Spenser for this very survey class. Maybe that's one good thing about teaching: returning to the same texts again and again can, in a funny way, keep you fresh.

I guess I'm thinking about this in part because I spent some time this spring re-reading favorite books from about 10 years ago, to see whether they were still good (and because I'd pretty much forgotten a lot of what happened in them). So I read Ullman's The Day on Fire, Nabokov's Ada, and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. All three were, indeed, excellent, and it was a real pleasure to discover them anew.

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On a totally unrelated note:

Although I haven't formally been tagged for Squadratomagico's new meme, I do have one wonderment: Why on earth do bars equate "loud" with "fun"? We were out somewhere on Friday (for a free happy hour courtesy of boyfriend's workplace) where we had to speak so loudly to be heard over the music that my throat is still rough and I'm still a little hoarse two days later. Decidedly not fun, I assert.

Is this really such a big deal?

So I'm thinking of buying a car.

I am, I confess, rather alarmed at this prospect.

Not only because I haven't driven in five years, or because I don't know how to buy a car (never having done it before)--these are scary factors, yes, but a) I'm going to have to drive to my new town anyway, and b) Boyfriend has promised to go with me to do all the car-checking-out stuff. (He's not particularly mechanically inclined, but he did buy a used car once, and he's also a generally calming person.) I'm also alarmed because not having a car has been sort of my thing for the better part of the last decade, and I kind of identify as a carless person. I didn't set out to develop a sense of self that had anything to do with car ownership, but as time went on I was increasingly glad that I didn't have the hassle of a car, of paying for insurance and gas, or of trying to park in extremely parking-unfriendly (but almost car-requiring) GradCity. And I really liked the fact that I was leaving a smaller environmental "footprint," as they're calling it these days. I don't contribute to traffic and I'm being slightly less detrimental to air quality and suchlike.

So why buy a car? Well, I will be living in the middle of a field, and while I'm only going to be about 2 blocks from my office and pretty close to a grocery store (I assume), it might be nice to get out of town now and again. For example, I'm not sure that there's a yoga studio in my town; I will in fact be surprised if there is one, particularly a good one. I'll also need to drive to the airport, and maybe to Big City to the North now and again.

And also a friend of mine is selling his car, which makes me feel less mistrustful.

I'm nervous, though. Is this a terrible decision? Or will it mark my entry into some kind of Land of the Grown-Ups? (Never mind that I did have a car--well, a family car--from the age of 20 until about 23. That was just a trial run; this will be adulthood for real.) (And really, at what age will I stop thinking of myself as somehow not quite an adult? My mother has frequently remarked that she still feels about the same as she felt at fourteen or sixteen or something. Perhaps I'm pursuing an illusory state of being. Of course, since I'm only jokingly pursuing it, I don't think that it matters; I'm as grown-up as I need to be, and really quite responsible. I swear!)

And mixed with the fear is a little bit of excitement.... Won't it be kind of nice to buy the groceries I actually want, instead of thinking about how much they weigh? The latter system--which I've used for so long now that it's second nature--results in pretty healthy purchasing; I can't buy ice cream if I'm going to buy pasta sauce and yogurt, and the latter are more practical, so the ice cream gets the axe. Vegetables are light and easy to transport. Etc. Not having a car also means not going to the mall (the only clothes-shopping venue in GradCity, more or less) and therefore spending less money on my wardrobe and other frivolous things. There are a million benefits to not having a car.

But of course, I've been living in an actual city, even if it is a rather modest one. FieldTown has a population of about 5,000 (and it really is in the middle of a field--it's very pretty, but isolated). While I'm sure that I could manage without a car--and a part of my hesitation in buying one is this kind of Spartan sensibility that I only adhere to at certain times but that causes me a great deal of anxiety and guilt at others--it might just be okay for me to have one.

Do other people go through this much anxiety and nonsense? About anything??