When I was fifteen I decided it was time for me to get a job. My mother and I drove all across town looking for a place that would take little me, a sophmore in high school with no experience whatsoever. I stumbled across Dairy Queen, and, well, the rest is history.

When I first started working there I had a sense of importance. No longer could I loaf around the house on Saturday mornings or sleep in on Sundays. I had a job now. With each price I memorized I felt more and more like a working woman of the twenty first century. So what if I was only dousing kiddie cups with rainbow sprinkles? In my mind, I was earning a living, and the day I received my very first paycheck was the day my purpose on this earth was affirmed. For a year and a half I took every paycheck I got and put it in the bank. Slowly the novelty of having a job and learning everything there is to know about it wore off. I resented going to work. I hated the people I worked with. I hated the customers, I hated ice cream, I hated cleaning, and I hated the unforgiving stickyness of walnuts in maple syrup. One day I quit with no plan thereafter of how I would manage. This event is all very well documented in past journal entries. After a month of unemployment I joined the rank of the Cashier. I always swore up and down that I would never become one of those mindless gum chewing robots but I figured I didn't have a choice. In the beginning Shoprite was lightyears better than Dairy Queen, but that too soon wore off, and I hated Shoprite as well. I hated it the six months I worked there before college and the three months I spent over summer break. But I smiled through it all, or tried to anyway, and kept saving my money.

So where does this all lead to? Well folks, after a year and a half of shoveling ice cream into bowls and nine months of running groceries across a scanner, I have purchased a car in this, the nineteenth year of my life, and I have never been so proud of anything or wanted anything as badly as I have this automobile. There were so many days and I nights in which there was seemingly no freedom from civil serivce and I couldn't see the point to it all, but now the fog has lifted and in its place stands a white Scion TC. When everyone in my grade began to drive, most of them got shiny new cars. I got a 12 year old Chevy Cavalier with manual windows, no tape or cd player, and no air conditioning. I loved that car but I couldn't help envying those with sunroofs and mufflers that did not fall off. Finally, something is mine. I worked for something, and I own it through and through, and no one can tell me where I can go and when I have to be home. The car is not here yet, since it takes a month or so for the dealership to get the one I wanted in stock, and I really don't think I'll be able to wait till Thanksgiving to drive. I can't imagine getting into a car that has not been driven by someone else. A car that still has new car smell, a car in which everything still works and knowing that I earned it. As much as I trash talk the petty jobs I've held, without them I'd be taking the bus.