#It's like a challenge for myself to see how verbose I can put the simplest of sentences

[lemonisntreal]

BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLI

[loseranthems]

How did you get into cars? I've always been curious because I visually love mechanical stuff but i dont know nuch about them.

what an awesome question! haha and it gives me a perfect situation to be verbose lol. so, uh, going back in ye olde life timeline, it definitely started when i was like… 5. lol. i grew up around a purebred 50′s idealist british uncle and my cousin, and every time we went over they both would be out front restoring this old clunker of a ‘65 beetle. my uncle also had this fixation on thunderbirds back then, so i think one of those was being worked on too. but anyway, yeah, it started with them. anyway prepare for an ESSAY after the cut haha

really, they’d spend all day out in the middle of every summer on their driveway dropping engines, scouring backend sites for parts, taking me to car shows in fields up in northern ontario. i’d always be in the background looking on with this immensely vested interest. like, “holy shit that looks amazing, can i do that?” so eventually, yeah, i got involved. everyone said it wasn’t something ‘little girls got into’ and told me i’d hate the dirtiness, the guy talk etc. but i think i was 7 and changing oil and tires and ruining all my shitty dresses and making my mom mad lmao so, ultimately, the love for it never left, really. even if the early stages were based around me making my mom mad LOLuh, god what else, i was introduced to watching F1 every time we went over, i’d sit doe-eyed at barrett-jackson every year, would salivate over old muscle mags left on bathroom floors. then eventually my cousin grew up and became a mechanic (i think hes at porsche now, that lucky SOB), did some work for toronto indy as a pit crew guy and told me everything, taught me socket sizes, let me help him organize his snap-on toolboxes etc. then ebay flew around and we all scoured that for days on end, huddled around their shitty small computer desk while my mom and my aunt just scowled lmao. i’d try and go to every car show, make it to every autoshow. so to be poetic, it just waved over me as something that burrowed into my bone marrow and never let go. it was a ‘boys club’ but i could always hold my own, and especially as a young girl it was a real fucking effort to fit in, but my passion for it kinda made everyone realize that it wasn’t just a phase. and shoutout to my dad for that, too, who always egged me on while going full boy-mode and doing whatever i wantedoh, and old top gear. (especially this segment on the vantage) not the pompous, explosions everywhere, family entertainment shit they have now, but seasons 3-12 kinda deal. they were some of the first people in mainstream media who made poetry out of vocalizing what cars are. how there’s this bone-deep connection to driving, this primal love for tinkering and working in a shed. but ultimately, it’s about going. exploring, being able to have this personal connection to this machine that can ultimately kill you, this 2-tonne thing that you could pull apart on your own as this humanizing way of making it better, more, faster, stronger. putting trust in something so intimately, and losing yourself to the experiences that driving gets you. don’t see it as something you get only groceries in. take the long way to the store, take the back road, start by changing your own oil and ignite that feeling of just going somewhere. essentially, they put out this, well, practically a love letter every wednesday to how driving felt. and that’s really what cars are. the largest inspiration for it all was my ex though, who god bless his soul, kinda ignited in me that whole passion of tinkering and doing it as a hobby that could turn into a career, etc etc. he became a mechanic, too, and that’s where a lot of our shared cars came from. but just imagine this passion for a couple of 17 year old kids who would get ass-blasted by insurance rates for anything smaller than a dodge caravan - so that’s where the love for old 80′s cars came in. especially anything group B. the whole thing behind them was that they were cheap to insure (surprisingly LOL) and that was like this a-ha moment of pivoting this niche near-brutalist aesthetic of 80′s iconoclasm and subpar safety and using that as the jump-off point from childhood car-poster-on-the-wall to ‘hey holy shit i can buy this myself’. i’d download old pdfs of rx7 manuals to help him change wiring harnesses and we both sat up for days on end learning how to drop the engine of the MR2, researching how to change the lights of our celica supra, burning oil on the highway in our bugeye. a lot of it was passion turned academic, having this need to learn more about it, watering the seedling of a spark that started in childhood, entering a veritable boys club and holding my own, etc etc. and just driving. i think me and him clocked a thousand Ks on that MR2 the first week we got it, on near-slicks up north. getting lost on unassumed gravel roads mid-winter in a mid-engined safety nightmare and just… driving. knowing the limits of the car, knowing it inside and out, gravitating to older and older cars which led to being more in tune with driving, finding more and more challenging roads, etc. struggling with stock wipers on a rainy day, fiddling with the handle of the passengers side door as it almost falls off, staring at the farms 40 minutes out of cityi have no idea where i’m going with this, but ultimately – i got into it from kinda growing up around it and simply never losing that spark of passion that i had. coincide that with my love for always being on the extreme edge of tomboyism and it was a perfect fit. i love everything automotive, it’ll be something i never let go. and if you ever want to get into it, always just go in wanting to learn. it’s a huge nebulae of facts and little measurements and one-off tricks and bro-ism, but it’s so worth it in the end. because despite the gatekeeping for being a girl, it’s ultimately all about driving your own shitbox and knowing it inside and out. and that’s it. it’s not about rolling up to every theatre parking lot at 3 am showing off a chrome muffler, or backfiring at every red light. modding is a culture in itself, but bypass that. go straight to what counts and make it your own and just learn. that’s really it, use driving as therapy and get lost in how the roads feel. it’s the simplest way to get into it without worrying about 14-year old boys with bolted on spoilers lol. and i bring up the gatekeeping a lot, but only because it really is such a fucking macho culture. it’s like walking into a real life COD lobby with mics on. but push past that and automotive culture at its core is so much more, and completely open to everyone