"Carpe Diem" tops fixing bent fender
by Jennifer White

A giant RV crunched my car up like a little ball of tin foil about a year ago. I haven’t fixed it yet. The dent is so bad that every time I hit a bump in the road, the crunched up part scrapes my tire. This is very annoying, but not half as annoying as my parents ranting about how dangerous it is to drive like that. Especially dangerous for a moron like me who can’t change a flat. But I don’t feel like forking out the nine hundred dollars it’s going to take for the repair. I’d rather do something stupid like run away to Europe. So I am.

I have been saving (off and on...) for a whole year to get the money to fix the car, but I have wanted to travel to Europe my entire life. Mostly just London and Paris, but my lust for all things European has broadened over many years of education, foreign movies and trips to Busch Gardens. My good friend Chris is studying in Bristol, England this semester, and I would be an absolute idiot if I were to pass up this chance to visit her.

So I took my car money out of my Hello Kitty bank and bought a passport and a plane ticket. I’ve spent close to five hundred bucks and I haven’t even left Virginia yet. My parents are not very happy with me. I was not very happy with me either, at first. The guilt was kicking my ass up and down the street, and I kept wondering if I had just flushed five hundred bucks down the toilet.

Maybe I am spending my money irresponsibly, but I don’t feel like being responsible this time. I am only twenty years old, and the way I look at it, I have decades ahead of me just teeming with intelligent decisions to make. I might as well be stupid while I still can. I’m lucky that this opportunity came at a time in my life when I have the ability to take advantage of it. And I can assure you that I am way more excited about going to Europe than I would be about fixing the car.

So my tire is going to be scraping all the way to the airport. And all the way home from the airport. And everywhere else I go until I get nine hundred dollars again. But I can handle that. I would be beating myself up right now if I had spent the money on something I could deal with for a little while rather than something I’ve been dreaming about my entire life. Now that would have been really stupid.