The Car Buying Journey Begins

On my list of "least favorite things to do" is buying a car. Ugh! I hate it so much. I tend to be the high mileage type, so this happens more for me than it does the average person....well, except a few of you who love the car buying experience and look for ways to make it happen in your life. Some of you know buying a car has been on my radar for a while now, since I was about to hit 200k miles, but I have been a bit stalled in the process. (This is not an unusual position for me in many areas of my life, as many can attest.)

So I began with "What kind of car do I buy?" I thought about upgrading. I absolutely fell in love with BMWs when I did the BMW Experience down in Greenville. After driving all of their cars in many different ways (they were all quite amazing machines), I determined that their sedans were for me. Sport cars didn't feel right, and SUVs seemed too big and clumsy. But am I really a BMW person? Am I a Lexus person? Am I a Mercedes person? For now I think I am still the Camry type. A few of you have confirmed that to me.

The next question is "Do I buy new or used?" There is no answer there yet. Low mileage matters to me....because of the car buying hatred and the lack of desire to go through this process anytime soon...but I have no strong feelings other than that. Yeah, I know you drive off the lot and it depreciates, but when you drive a car into the ground that matters a bit less to you. So, time will tell what I decide there. My last car was a low mileage used, the one before that new. Both were good decisions for their time.

So here I am. Probably the next step is to go look at new and gently used Camrys and decide what matters to me in a new car. There are a few upgrades I know I want, a few more I want to consider, and I need to really think through what should be my end result.

But I dread the next stage. I hate auto dealerships. No type of business frustrates me as much as they do. I think they remain the most sexist of industries, and no sales people (male or female, funnily enough) have treated me worse than I have been treated in the auto showroom. While I really don't mind negotiating, and even feel it is a strength in many areas of my life, the process just infuriates me. I have tested my sexism theory out, as have other friends, and while certainly other factors could enter into the picture, I don't find them to be legitimate. It feels like sexism and I hate it. And I don't really care to invest what it takes to get beyond it....so we end up at odds.

The last two times I went through the car buying process I ended up buying through the AAA car buying service, which was simple and painless and resulted in a far better deal than I was able to get than going direct to the dealership. I know that because I tried dealerships first, who wanted to charge me a higher price for the same car.  I'm expecting this to happen again, but I am going to try to pursue this with an open mind. I invite you on the journey and will report back the results.

And if you have advise....if I am doing this wrong....I am willing to change my approach. Maybe I am still colored by the very first time I bought a new car when I was in my twenties, and was shown the exact same car in five different colors (even after telling the guy that color was not my first priority.) So let's talk. How do I make this easier? It's time to get down to business...my car is starting to show its age and I don't have time for car trouble. I hope that possibly this time the experience will be different, though I am already checking out the AAA listing. Let's call it realism through experience, instead of a weary pessimism.

Locked Out

The great news is that finally I got rid of my wretched Blackberry work phone and moved to an iPhone 6. Contrary to my friend Al, who hates all things "i", I love i-Stuff. My personal phone is an iPhone 4s, and while I liked the first one I had, my current one has had some issues. But compared to the Blackberry, it is amazing.

But the 6......oh. Love at first sight. Well, maybe at least love at first fingerprint. I loved that little feature. I have a bazillion passwords to remember, that have to be changed every three months (or more often when I forget them), so being able to get into my phone by the touch of my fingerprint...a game changer. Well, until the day it wouldn't accept my fingerprint.....and what I knew to be my password.

It drove me nuts. I kept trying. Some if you know what happens when you try your iPhone password too much. It totally locked me out of my phone. To the point where I had to do a total factory re-set. Which I didn't have time for. So for three days I had to go without my work phone, until I had time to re-do everything. Actually it was five days....I got the phone going, but then had to re-do my company set-up. Painful.

I was around a lot of people this past weekend. One thing about being in a crowd...you analyze people. At least I do. I love the relationship dynamics and the electricity and even watching those just going through the motions. My latest revelation? There are some folks that drive me nuts. Who I just don't get. Who I will think I understand one moment, and then they simply confound me. It's like I'm putting my fingerprint on that phone sensor and getting in with no issue 100 times, but doing the exact same thing again and it locks me out. On one hand I think these folks are "my people" and yet on the other I wonder if I understand them at all. If they're "my people" I should understand them, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

I look at me from a few paces back and I suspect I may be a bit confounding myself. Sometimes I may mask my feelings. Sometimes I act like I don't care about something when I care very much. Sometimes I can't quite figure out what I am feeling and so what comes out reads as something entirely different than what it really is. Sometimes I am tired and mentally exhausted and it comes out as anger and impatience. Sometimes something innocent triggers pain and I do a dance so no one looks in my eyes and sees it there. Sometimes I am aloof, but at the core scared. Sometimes in need of attention, so clumsily try to get it. Other times in need of anonymity, so trying to blend in to the point of not being seen. Sometimes I am simply out of my depth, and try to pretend that I am not.

Knowing all this about me, it shouldn't surprise me that sometimes I can't get a good read on others. I think that on one hand we all want people to understand us, but yet a part of us may want to remain a mystery. If we let them too close, they just may see that we're all vulnerable human beings who want someone's thumbprint to open up the secret to who we are, but are scared to let them get too close.

That Blackberry of mine was not a great communication tool. I only took it out to read an occasional email. But my rebooted iPhone 6....it's doing the job for which it was intended. I want to use it and it opens up new avenues of communication. Maybe our relationships need a factory reboot... before we simply put them on a shelf. Maybe we need to focus on forgetting the past, beginning again, and see if we can do things different. It's intimidating, it can be difficult, and it is confounding...but that is the world of relationships. It is worth the investment of some time and attention....even if the pathway may seem a bit confusing. It may get us to the place where our fingerprint opens up a world of possibilities for closeness and intimacy and relationships that are genuine.

The Release

UT

I was talking to a guy at work the other day. Not someone who works for my company, but someone whose path crosses with mine often in our work life. We were talking about work stress and he confessed "The other day I finally had to get away. I took a walk. All of a sudden I found that tears were coming down my cheeks. I was crying! I'm a grown man, Kim....I don't remember the last time I cried. It's just not healthy."

I laughed at him....yes, sometimes I am a terrible person....and told him "That was probably the healthiest thing you have done in a long while."

As we continued to talk he realized that things really did get better after that little meltdown. He was surprised. As I told him, sometimes you have to let the emotions out and refill with proper perspective and determination.

I am a crier. I cry fairly easily.....but sometimes inappropriately. A major work problem...I can handle that with no tears. If there is a job to be done and problems to solve, that is where I excel. A critical co-worker, however....it probably will be a gully washer (hopefully in the car as I drive home.)

I've found I cry most often when people disappoint me....or I feel I disappoint other people. I cry when I am frustrated and can't figure out a way to change people or circumstances and make them "right". The idealist in me just can't understand why things aren't fair... why people don't care about others and try to do the right thing. I don't understand why they can't see me as I see me. On one hand I know we can seldom be the person other people think we should be....but a part of me just can't accept it.

I cry where someone else may get inappropriately angry. Same emotions felt....different ways to deal with it. I heard the quote "Anger is fear masked" once and it changed the way I looked at anger. I think tears are also a mask for fear. The good thing about both tears and anger is they cause us to release some negativity. The bad thing about both is sometimes we do it inappropriately. Sometimes it doesn't really release the anger and frustration, but gives life to it.

I think we have to be careful dealing with anger and tears in others. Neither are pure forms of expression. We have all seen crocodile tears and bursts of anger used for dramatic effect...so someone can get their own way. When that happens you have to learn "Please don't feed the emotion." When we let the emotional outbursts let someone get their way, we reinforce that as an appropriate and effective behavior. We can console, we can help the person determine why they are emotional, but we cannot enable the behavior. Yes, it's tough to balance, but if we care about that person, we cannot reward a negative behavior pattern. You can love them in spite of it, though.

Life is hard, work is hard.....sometimes the emotions overcome. We need to be there for each other. We need to remind each other that most of us feel overwhelmed at times. We need to stay away from the very wrong platitudes like "God won't give you any more than you can handle." We need to shift our view. When you are feeling overwhelmed, sometimes it is simply we are willingly taking on more than God intended (maybe because we won't utter that word that scares us...."no"). Sometimes we are not keeping things in proper perspective and we are making them more important in our lives than they should be. We need to re-balance. And sometimes we are not handing over our too heavy load to God and trusting that he is able to handle it on our behalf.

""Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." Matthew 11:28

Release, relax and rely on God and those people he has placed around you to help carry the load. You are not intended to do it all alone. And it is OK to cry.

Imperfectly Perfect

Truth is, as a single person I may be a bit hard on you partnered folk. I get frustrated sometimes as I watch relationships unravel. So precious, and yet I see people treating them casually, even throwing them away without much thought. Especially when I can see the potential for greatness, if they'd just give each other a bit more grace. If they'd just see the good of what is there and relax in it.

My heart smiled this week. A friend was talking about a task her husband had performed, well... imperfectly. She is in the midst of a self-improvement program and had created a vision board to chart her progress and motivate her. She had asked her husband to hang it on the wall for her, knowing in the back of her mind that this was not the kind of a task that he usually performed well. When it was done, it was lopsided, multiple holes were in the wall and all kinds of wires were hanging all around it. Her first thought was to "fix" it. After she cringed.

But then, as she was talking about it, she said something to the effect of "I couldn't be upset with him. Mainly because this is the same man who tells me I am beautiful."

Oh. My.  Heart. I think that was one of the romantic things I have heard in a while. Isn't that what really matters? He loves her. He supports her. He tells her. Not just verbally, though the verbal is important to many of us, but as another friend described it, in "imperfectly perfect" ways. Doing things for her at which he doesn't especially excel. A gift of the heart, regardless of the outcome.

While truly she wanted to change it, she waited.

By bedtime he had already talked about how he was going to make it look better, if she decided  it was hung at the right height. He was going to try to fix it, without any prompting from her. She didn't need to fix it herself. She didn't need to criticize. She had just thanked him and looked at it as the gift it was. Knowing that gift of service was imperfectly performed. She could look at it and know....this man, her husband, thinks she is beautiful. Just the way she is. Even before the results of her self-improvement program are where she wants them to be. Her walking vision board.

OK, I am a romantic, though maybe not a traditional one. I'm a bit cynical of big romantic gestures... I tend to think they are more to show off to a crowd than to show anything real about the relationship. (Some of my friends love these big gestures....you're certainly allowed!) When it gets down to it, your relationships are more about what happens when it is just between the two of you. How kind, how patient, how respectful, how encouraging, how loving you are. 

As my friend continues with her healthy eating and more movement program (I like the sound if that better than diet and exercise), her board will chart her progress. But on those days when the weight may not be moving down, or she misses a workout or two, her personal walking vision board will tell her she is beautiful. Because he sees her....the person she really is. That is love in action. That is perfect. She can be confident in that knowledge even on those days when they just may miss attaining perfection.

Give those you love best the most grace. Don't they deserve it?