My College Essay on Cars

Couldn’t really decide where to put this, so I’ll just leave it here. I couldn’t decide what to write about for my college essay, so I did it on my ongoing car addiction, and I must say, I’m pretty darn proud of it. Feel free to read it over, critique it, or just keep scrolling. It’s a free country.

We are asked to indicate, demonstrate, inflate, exaggerate, overrate, and even pontificate some element of our lives; some passion we have developed over our relatively short 16-18 years on this planet as part of our college application.  If I was an athlete, I would say something like “sport X was so life changing and made me a better person”, or if I was a musician, I could say “instrument X allows me to escape and be myself”, or some generic line like that.  But I am neither of those, and I find it difficult to believe that a sarcastic, hormonal teenager (myself included) actually thinks as deeply about those things as they say they do on their college essay.  The only things I have seen teenagers get passionate about is their wonderful social media devices that they carry around all the time.  Again, myself included, but I use mine as a link to my true passion (or addiction), which, for most of my life, has been illegal.  Now you think, oh great, this kid is some kind of druggie or something.  But it’s not drugs and it’s not alcohol either.  It’s not illegal for anyone over the age 17, and in fact, it’s something you probably do everyday.  It’s driving.

Or rather, cars in general, as I haven’t been able to drive until very recently. I believe my first taste of grease and gasoline was a few years back, when my mom bought me a Need for Speed game for Christmas. Since then, my car problem has grown into a car addiction, and I am forced to skulk around street corners, waiting for someone to drive by in something cool. I have turned to synthetics in recent months, after finally getting a smartphone, and now as soon as I get home from school, I lock myself in my room and shoot up my deprived veins with cheap car reviews on Youtube. My dreams are filled with rumbling V8’s and whining superchargers, and my nightmares are haunted with automatic transmissions and the Toyota Prius. I could have had some kind of normal addiction, like marijuana or cocaine, but no, now I have become dependent, and I don’t know if I can ever escape the hole I have dug for myself. My friends and family avoid me, and my new circle of friends are people that a few years ago, I never would have thought I’d socialize with. Me, a left wing, glasses wearing, skinny kid, relating to a community that is largely made up of right wing, middle aged men with beer guts (no offense to the aforementioned). I’m even president of the environmental club; I should despise these gas guzzling, emissions spewing machines. So why am I so drawn to them?
I have no idea.
But that’s the fun of it, isn’t it? Humans have always been drawn to things that defy them and mysteries that confound them, and for me, enjoying these cold metal, grease filled beasts goes against every moral that I have. But as I said earlier, I don’t really think about it day to day. And now that I have recently taken the final step into the abyss of my addiction by obtaining my license and my first car (2004 Mitsubishi Eclipse GTS, absolutely gorgeous), I don’t know if I will ever think about it again. I’ll just keep driving down that bleak, wonderful highway, hating and loving myself at the same time. And that’s fine by me.