I Spent The New Year With The Holiday Flu And Want To Give Kudos To The CrossCabriolet, But Also To Hell With AI
It started with a tickle of the throat. That was on Jan. 1. I was traveling the day before, a two-hour flight from PHX to DFW. Quick trip, no issues getting home. Little did I know that initial tickle would turn into something worse. What followed quickly was bad congestion, sneezing, fatigue, and a general vibe of feeling like knocking on death’s door.
Finally, Jan. 9, I start to come out of it. Compared to what I’ve endured the last ten days, I feel alive! The size of my lungs make me feel like I can breathe in the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere! Water tastes right again and I can ingest more than a few scraps of food.
Needless to say, there’s been some reflection in this downtime. I’ve been thinking about various things; what I want WAC to be, how I want my career path to look, and really, what I want out of life. 2023 saw a lot of soul searching, it was only toward the latter half of the year that I started to see some answers. This blog being one of them.
So I went into the new year with an epic illness, something that doesn’t happen very often. I was even asymptomatic the one time I caught Covid. So I’m afraid of it cropping up again like some terrible 1980s scifi grunge stemming from the worst source. Somewhere in my despair, the goals I want to reach became quite clear.
The thought process started with the Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet, a convertible SUV that nobody asked for, few people bought, and enough were made to extend the production run a few years. It was an unnecessary eyesore of a vehicle, yet not an impossible thing to see out and about, as somewhere around 6000 were made before it met its demise in 2014.
This was said before its launch:
(T)he CrossCabriolet is not just for cruising South Beach or Malibu. It’s a vehicle to take to lunch, running errands or on a long ski weekend in any part of the country.
The description used, and a lot of the blurb, could be applied to any automobile and still be true. It’s also not clear who the target demographic is, nor why this was commissioned to be built in the first place. I feel for Nissan, I really do. Because like the car, my life is a bit of a headscratcher.
There’s a mental health phenomenon called the Pandemic Skip, which psychologist Nova Cabban basically explains that it’s the “sense that we have missed out a chunk of time, growth and opportunity as a result of our lives going on pause during the pandemic.” In other words, the age of your brain is still stuck to the initial 2020 lockdown. If I’m 27 now, that puts me mentally 23.
In my case, I was a newly minted college graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in Dec. 19. Weeks later, the world shut down. I picked myself up by doing odd jobs until I was selling cars for two years starting in 2021. Through all that time, I could never shake the feeling that it was a temporary role. It was like a limbo effect always there to keep me on my toes. I struggled for a long time to snap out of. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I could finally snap out of it.
Meanwhile, the world moved on. Digital mediums and the people inside them critique it constantly. The cognitive dissonance seems to grow between what’s shared online versus the reality. AI has a lot to do with it aside from being a misinforming machine. It takes away a part of brain stimulation so people only absorb what’s in front of them. Not everyone falls into this trap but it sets a scary precedent for the future if it’s not contained. To hell with AI.
And there’s me, trying to call myself a writer. Because the degree I hold is in journalism. I fear that the time to break into traditional news media has passed, leaving me to scramble for a way forward.
In this day and age, I find solitude in putting a pen to paper. Through the pandemic and since then, I’ve found solitude as a freelancer, and I found it in kicking off this blog. As a therapeutic exercise, I want WAC to continue. At the same time, I see the potential it can grow into. And that’s enough to get me excited.
So once again, a massive thank you to my early supporters, and a future thank you to the supporters who join me along the way. If I can reach the readers with the smallest inkling of an interest to cars, that’s a job well done. Because there’s a line between those who know cars and those who enjoy them. All I can do is try to bridge the gap.
In time, there will be enough grease in the wheels for me to churn out blogs on the daily. Now that the flu is coming down and I’m not questioning life so much, the way to a better one is lucid.
-TA