My Mini has turned me into a car person, and I'm not sure how to feel about that
I used to not care about cars whatsoever. Sure, I could appreciate the aesthetics of classic cars, the curves, the materials, the chrome - but I couldn't have cared less about anything beyond that. When someone asked me about my old car, I could tell them the make and model, when it was built and - on a good day - what horsepower the engine put out, but ask me anything beyond that and I'd have to defer to the registration or google. I only washed it when I went to visit family or appear at people's weddings or christenings, or when it got so mucky that utilising the outside door handles would elicit a strong desire to wash my hands.
It was a nice car, to be sure: made at a time when most cars still had great (and identifyable) design it was quite comfortable and drove well, but it was something that got used instead of fawned over. My bicycle I've always meticulously cleaned and maintaned and fawned over in addition to riding it everywhere, but not my car. In fact, I could not even begin to understand peoples' obsession with cars; these noisy, expensive death boxes spitting out malodorous fumes whose main purpose seemed to shift more towards compensating for a lack of self-esteem rather than transportation the more noisy, expensive, and foul-smelling they got.
Then I sold my old car because - despite how nice and pretty it had once been - it was starting to show its age. I decided to buy a Cooper SE, mainly because unlike my old car it's small, it's electric, and it's not 13 years old with 250.000 km on the clock and every little broken thing that comes with old (but not classic) cars. And lo and behold, I was suddenly very excited about the car I had ordered. I was excited while I was waiting for updates from the dealer, I was excited when I got the call the car was ready for pickup, and I am still excited every time I get in. Regularly I catch myself glancing over the shoulder when leaving the car. Hell, in the few months I've owned the car I have not just washed it but hand-washed it more often than I'd run the old car through the car wash over the course of any given year I'd owned it.
And this is still happening, well past the honeymoon-phase. I bought cleaning utensils, I bought polish for the exterior plastic bits, I even bought a hand-held vacuum whose sole function it is to hoover the interior of my car. I know my Mini's dimensions, its power-output, I know the bloody model codes even of Minis I've never owned or driven and I have come, not without some degree of horror, to the realisation that I, once endowed with an almost aggressive desinterest in anything car-related, have become a car person who can't wait to get behind the wheel of his beloved death box or get out the cleaning supplies to devote himself to the sisyphean task of keeping his ride spotless - all because of that little car, and I have no idea how to feel about that.