Cruising Down Life
June 28, 2021
There are a lot of ways to start a blog post, but it has been a year since the COVID-19 lockdown and a lot has happened, mainly around cars and my life, I decided to showcase my massive nerdiness and explain my world view, from cars. Don’t worry I’m feeling as anxious as you as I’m writing this piece, and I promise I will tangent to my findings of life from my car adventure.
There is nothing more agitating on this magnificent green planet than unnecessity and inefficiency. I came across a leg curl machine in one of those fancy gyms that had a million adjustments and a million more hinges, but somehow it had the back adjustment right between your ass cheeks, so if you are tall, like me, and have to push the back adjustment all the way, you have the sensation of doing a number two during a workout. Arnold Schwarzenegger was using a leg curl machine when he was training for Mr Olympia, if it was good enough for him then why would a company reinvent the gym machine only to make it worse?
The thing is, we are living in a world of consumerism. Clothes go out of fashion after 2 months, your phone couldn’t last for more than a year, your TV gets replaced every 3 years and even your fridge now have touchscreens. We don’t really need a new River Island shirt every 2 months, an iPhone SE is still perfectly useable today; and how exactly does your life get any better by having a touchscreen to operate the temperature control, outside the fridge?
But we can’t help it, we are humans and get bored of things very easily, and companies have to find new ways and make new products to keep their business afloat. You probably won’t need another grey T shirt in their wardrobe until another year, but Top Man needs your money for this financial quarter, so they just had to put some random design to convince you to put your debit card on the table, even though they were worse off than the previous ones; and until communism suddenly happens around the world this trend will only grow linearly.
Among this world of complication, it is simply too hard not to be bamboozled by all the glamour and temptations; your mates are showing their wine and dine on Instagram and every single corner of the street is filled with billboards and signs of the latest fashion trends; every car has fitted with the newest and the latest technologies that might seem to make your life easier, and you are told because of these you will be “living the moment” like your mate, or smile like the girl in the billboard because you have just solved a problem in your life, or is it?
My answer came along in one of the biggest event happened so far during my generation: when the whole world went into hibernation, the usual place where people dress fancy to were all shut, and everyone was forced to stay home. If I were to speak for myself my whole daily routine was turned upside down; when I would usually leave my house at 8:32am to get to the office at 8:58am; go to the gym at 12:30 during lunch, at 6pm I would either go home, or drinks with my colleagues and head home at 2am. Now with everything shut, I was at home with my (ex) girlfriend, watching TV after working on the laptop in the living room. And that got me thinking: my life had been stripped to the basic, and I wasn’t motivated with anything, even my engineering day job had become a routine and that was very scary for me – I thought I loved engineering!
Back in December 2019 I drunk purchased a rustbox Toyota MR2 for £280 after a nightout with my colleagues, my majestic original plan was to learn how to fix a car, by trying to fix a car that I didn’t really care about; I never actually had the time for it and if I had the time for it I would’ve been drunk or intoxicated in a thousand ways. With the lockdown happening, there was only 3 options I have after work: 1) learn how to make a cocktail and get drunk consistently and skillfully 2) watch Netflix and drink water, until water gets too boring and I open the fridge to look for beers, which meant getting drunk eventually 3) work on my MR2 and get fingers so dirty my housemates wouldn’t let me touch the wine glass. I decided to give my liver a break, and so Option 3 it was.
And what a decision it had become; for about a year and a half now that I had my MR2, I swapped my old Alfa Romeo 159 for a 20 year old BMW 530i, rented a garage which I call it “The Playhouse” with my neighbour who also had his Honda Civic that needed to be built, and guess what – he had almost 10 years of automobile experience as a mechanic and a bodywork specialist so there’s plenty for me to learn from; what’s more since I was determined to swap the engine of my MR2 with the Yamaha tuned 2ZZ engine, I bought a Toyota Celica T Sport, put it on temporary insurance and ran it for 6 weeks, before I took it to the playhouse, took the engine out and scrap the remaining of the car. I have to say this again – can you imagine me, a lad who has been living a comfy life with a nice office job as a civil engineer, get underneath the car to disconnect the drive shaft, and when the engine came out of the car I was jumping up and down like a kid who has seen a turtle an aquarium for the first time? I couldn’t, my 9-year-old self who wrote “Full time engineer part time mechanic” probably thought it would be nothing other than another 3-mark question on the assignment.
There’s a lot of studies regarding happiness, and if you use Google there’s actually a quadrillion articles to tell you how to live your life, a life coach will tell you to do yoga, meditate, go to the gym; a religious person will tell you to devote yourself to god, but ultimately it is purely down to you on where to find it – no one else. If I were a life coach I will tell everyone to rent a garage and get a project car immediately, but what has worked for me would not work for you, what has worked for Elon Musk wouldn’t work for me either, it is all down to me, and whether I could find my balance.
My passion with cars and all engineering related began when I was 4 years old, I love to look at any structures and think of how it worked and how it was built (that includes looking at a Vauxhall Corsa and think how many brain cells went into designing such a boring car, probably not more than 2); and now my day includes going to the gym at 7am, back in my house to start my bridge building engineering day job at 9am, and when I finish I get to the garage and wrench away on my cars. It can get very tiring, very frustrating, but when I came home I felt as if I had just conquered France.
I have been on nightouts and got drunk with my mates a few times, while I had a great time and memories were made, that feeling of “yes I’m smashed I’m having the best time of my life” had never occurred to me like it did anymore, worst still I would feel age had caught up with me the day after with the hangover, and I would be just sitting at the garage gasping for oxygen while my brain cells try to talk to each other with 2G network, next thing I know the weekend was gone and I just lost a full day at the garage, when I could get my happiness by wrenching away on the cars.
The Henry From Hong Kong, who would happily go out and get drunk every day of the week, even attempted the Oceana challenge by going to the same nightclub and drunk with vodka and beer for 7 full nights, now decides if he’s not wrenching away on the cars he’s at a mate’s house playing card games, chilling and playing UFC on the PS4, and he’s none the happier.
So conclusion, and it is quite a surprising one for me: the COVID lockdown has connected me with my source of happiness, and fun fact this is the first blog I had written that I wasn’t drunk and intoxicated.
Back to the office in July 2021 so this blog was written just in time.