car karma

This weekend I flew to Los Angeles to pick up my new wheels; a white 2004 Matrix that I found on Auto Trader. After two weeks of searching locally, I realized how few used Matrixes (Matrices?) there are for sale. They're quite popular and have only been manufactured since 2003, so most of the used ones available either have too many miles or have something funky about it. One I looked at was indigo blue with 14k gold-plated Toyota emblems and gold stripes down the side. Ick. After about five minutes parked in my 'hood, those emblems would be plucked right off.

On the drive back home, I got a call from my friend Annille. He had given me a ride to the airport in my old Honda, and was using the car over the weekend while I was gone. Sheepishly he asks me, "When you left, your car had four windows, right?" While he was parked at a club Saturday night, somebody smashed the passenger side front window in. Presumably they were attempting to steal my stereo, but here's the wacky part. Not only did the thief not get away with the stereo, but they left behind somebody else's stereo, a comb, Chapstick, and a spritzer of New Car spray! How lovely of him. Now my Matrix can be kept in mint-smelling condition for months to come.

Also while in LA, I attended the 30th birthday party of my college friend Eleanor. I hadn't seen her since June of 2003, when I was in LA interviewing for a job with a Japanese English school. The party was fun (I did a karaoke rendition of Salt 'n' Pepa's Shoop) and I finally met Elly's fiance, Brian. Barbara was down from SF for the party also, and we had brunch Sunday with our friend Hunter who relocated to the City of Angels a few years ago to give up his law career in pursuit of acting.

It is with great elation that I announce that today is my last day at Siebel. I've spent the morning doing a photo shoot of the campus for posterity's sake while trying to mask my giddiness that this era of my career is about to come to an end.

Tomorrow I'm going camping at Harbin Hot Springs for a few days of soaking, hiking, yoga, relaxation and sun before I begin full-time at World of Good on May 2.

brand of the free

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet...

"Did you know that the new car smell is sprayed into the cars two hours before the cars leave the factories?" my friend Sarah, who works for Ogilvy in New York City, commented on my last entry. She sent me an interesting article written by Martin Lindstrom, a well known marketing expert and author. He speaks about the emotional responses we have and bonds we make with brands based on the impression made on us with everything from packaging design to color, shape, smell and sounds.

What's in a brand? Why are we, perhaps despite our better intentions, so malleable? Why are we such suckers for for the warm fuzzies and recognition cues that marketers are able to evoke in us?

While shopping for cars these past couple of weeks, I've seen my own brand bias emerge. Take the Pontiac Vibe vs. the Toyota Matrix. The cars are virtually identical. They share the same Toyota innards (engine, transmission, suspension, brakes). I test drove them both last weekend and found that they handle, accelerate and brake exactly the same. From the inside, I could have been in the exact same car as all the interior styling, right down to the cup holders, is identical.

Despite my preference for the Vibe's option packages and slightly more sporty exterior styling, I'm planning to buy a Matrix. Why? Because it's a Toyota. It's Japanese. It's reliable. It's fun and youthful. The Pontiac, on the other hand, is American. It's an old person's car. It's blue collar. It's a lemon. My brand new Fusion Vibe is gonna be broken down by the side of the road after 20,000 miles. I just know it.

I know this is utter nonsense, but you see, I am an impressionable young consumer. And hell, if I am going to be duped by some marketer, for some reason I feel better about being duped by a Japanese marketer than my own fellow American. I know I know, the Toyota marketer is probably American too.

In my pursuit of new socially-responsible work clothes to go with my socially-responsible job, I discovered a clothing store that I love. American Apparel is a new, "sweatshop-free, brand-free clothing" company that recently opened a store on San Francisco's Haight Street. The white walls are plastered with unretouched color photographs of amateur models splayed out in various pseudo-erotic poses; kind of a cross between Benetton and Calvin Klein. Their brightly colored cotton clothes are all easily interchangable (think "Units" from the 80s), simply designed and cheaply made so they can crank out hundreds of the same pattern quickly and still be able to pay their Los Angeles-based team of clothing assemblers a livable wage. It's remarkable. They've somehow managed to create a brand out of no brand at all.

Alright, I'm still a sucker. But at least I am a well-dressed sucker.

there is no spoon

When I turned 16, my mom tried to teach me to drive her blue 1983 Honda Civic with manual transmission. I wore her already paper-thin patience even thinner by repeatedly stalling the thing and nearly sideswiping parked cars. My lessons were cut short and for the remainer of high school and college, I relied on the bus and the goodwill of friends to get me where I needed to go.

My first job out of college was in Trumbull, a small suburban town in Connecticut where having a car for work was an imperative. My good friend Jenn gave me a crash course in driving on her automatic transmission white Ford Escort. After a few weeks of practice, I got my driver's license two weeks before my 22nd birthday in the town where I went to college.

Before starting my job, Jenn's mother gave me more lessons on her Jeep Cherokee. Like Jenn, she was a good teacher. Confidence was high. I ran to the nearest Honda dealership and custom ordered a silver, 1997 Honda Civic EX to lease. The week I was supposed to pick it up, I called to check on insurance. I was devastated to learn that with only one month of driving experience, most insurance companies wouldn't even cover me. I became what they term an "assigned risk" and my insurance payments were to be about $500/month. I cried and called the Honda dealership to cancel my order. Instead of my brand spanking new wheels, I bought a gray 1986 Honda Accord with 133,000 miles on it from an obese woman who had tweaked the car's chassis by riding around on it solo for 11 years.

In 1998, I sold the Accord and bought a blue 1991 Honda Civic with 79,000 miles from a priest who usually walked to work. It's been a good car these past 7 years, but now it's time to move on.

My new job will require me to be on the road four days each week, covering my territory from beautiful seaside Monterey in the south up to our state's capital, Sacramento, in the north. I need a new car. It has to be comfortable, reliable, get decent gas mileage, not cost a fortune to insure, and be large enough to carry the product kiosk for work, but still small enough to park on San Francisco streets without causing my blood pressure to soar.

I've never owned a new car before. This is a pretty exciting process. I've spent the last two weeks surveying cars on the road; keeping my eyes peeled for something that meets my criteria and stands out. My sister Erica called me from the road the other day to say she was driving behind my future car: a Toyota Matrix. I still haven't seen one in person, but everything I'm reading on-line is giving me hope. It seems like it could be the one! Does anyone out there own one? Do you have a suggestion for something similar that I may not be considering? What would Click and Clack do?

snapshot: life in numbers

13 - days I've had the flu
9 - symptoms associated with said flu (in the order in which they have occured: sore throat, fatigue, body aches, loss of appetite, fever, sleeplessness, chest cough, stuffy nose, sinus pressure)
2 - times I've done yoga since I got sick
10 1/2 - average number of hours I've worked per day at my new job
11 - Whole Foods markets I've been to in the last week
1 - hot produce workers at Whole Foods markets
83 - minutes it takes me to get to my new office on public transportation
31 - minutes it takes me to get to my new office in my car
$14 - what it costs to park at my new office
$4.50 - what it costs to take public transportation to work
162,455 - miles on my 1991 Honda Civic
4 - makes of cars to which I've narrowed my new-car search (VW, Subaru, Honda, Toyota)
$2.62 - average price per gallon for gas (and rising)
12 - times my roommates or I have blown a fuse, causing my computer to go down (very BAD!!!)
1 - times I've lost blog entries when the fuse blew
11 - number of people my roommate Amy and I met during the roommate search before deciding on Paul
13 - number of days Paul's room has been empty, waiting for him to move in
10 - average minutes per day I've had time to do personal stuff on the computer in the past two weeks
15 - books in a stack next to my bed
7 - blogs I read on a regular basis
729 - songs I've gotten around to uploading into my iTunes
47 - photographs I've taken in the last two months (with someone else's camera)
3 - movies I've watched this week (Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Motorcycle Diaries, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back)
1 - times I've been out in the last 13 days

first day and camera on the way

I love my job. I can't believe I am getting paid to do this. OK, so I am only one day in, but I already see what a perfect fit it is. I even get to apply my anal-compulsive organization skills to keeping our product displays straight.

Yesterday, after getting paperwork in order and getting familiar with the product warehouse (a big store room and a series of closets in our temporary incubator space), Priya and I drove to visit our San Francisco customers. We went to two Whole Foods markets, the California Academy of Sciences gift shop, Body Time on Haight Street, and Rainbow Grocery. Today was a Siebel day and it must be said; shifting gears back to cubicle/computer mode was a trick. Did I mention I don't even have a computer for my new job? Score!

I spent the Saturday before my first day of work in Berkeley shopping for costumes at vintage and used clothing stores with Barbara, my good friend from college. She's throwing her boyfriend a surprise theme party for his 30th birthday. An important site of anti-war rallies and the center of civil rights movements of the 60s and 70s, the area of town around UC Berkeley still maintains a wonderfully crunchy, patchoulli-infused air about it. My office is in Berkeley, mostly because Priya and Siddharth both live and went to business school there, but what an ideal and appropriate location for this kind of socially-conscious company to be operating.

Saturday evening I visited with Chris, my good friend and travel partner in India (and some of Thailand and Nepal). He lives in a beautiful house in Oakland, the city right next to Berkeley. His roommate's bedroom looks like something straight out of one of those interior decorating reality TV shows. We talked and reminisced for hours in the hot tub under the stars. He made me a copy of Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra every record store in Nepal played on interminable repeat. Though it became the official theme of my trip there, I got so sick of it, I never bothered to get myself a copy. I listened to it while doing yoga the other morning and the first notes had me sobbing as rushes of memories from Nepal filled my mind and heart. Sigh.

This daylight savings time change is messing with my head. I love it (came home from work and had time for a sunset jog), but my body is still keenly aware that something is askew and I am having a hard time getting to bed in enough time to get enough sleep for my big days. Tomorrow Priya and I will visit our customers south of San Francisco.

I bought a new camera online tonight, a Canon Powershot S70. It's basically a very-souped of version of the camera I lost. Just in time for the season of silliness that is about to get underway here in San Francisco. Stay tuned.

zzzzzzz

I keep starting and stopping posts and not getting them published. I've been working hard, interviewing potential new roommates (Chris is moving out, but I knew that when I moved in), spending quality time with good friends (more stories than I can possibly tell), dancing my ass off (incredible party at False Profit last weekend) and sleeping a lot in the past four days to get over this flu I picked up. I start my new job tomorrow (still working part-time at Siebel and phasing out over the next month) and am extremely excited and a little bit nervous. So many little things have happened in the last ten days I feel at a loss for where to start writing tonight. It's getting late. I want to be well-rested for my first day. Off to sleep. More later.