Add to this phenomenon the fact that my parents believed in having awesome cars that go vroom when you pound the pedal to the plastic floor mat (and in the case of my very first car, shake like an unattended blender when you pound on the brake), and you get a rather large emotional investment in being able to get up and go.
You also get a rather sizable financial investment in the oil industry, but not one that really reaps a whole lot of interest.
I started driving independently--and thus with some minor responsibility for the gas tank--a decade ago. Young drivers are not known for their fuel efficiency, but luckily my car, who I always liked to think of as a crotchety old British man in a beige tartan mackintosh, made up for my deficiencies by having the gas mileage of a much younger and smaller car (I didn't judge him for his age, size, or the unfortunate palsy of his deceleration).
Also, and I would not come to appreciate this until much, much later in my life as a driver: gas cost, on average, $1.26 per gallon. I could fill my gas tank for about 17 dollars.
Now, this isn't all peaches and cream. $1.26 comprised a much larger percentage of my hourly wage back then. I made $5.15 per hour at the Godfather's Pizza, where we weren't allowed to accept tips and people threw pizza dough at my head and shoved ice cream down my uniform (to be fair, they also rather endearingly wrote my name in spray-butter and slurry on the walk-in door, so it's not like they were mean). Even then I listened to my parents ubi sunt tales of mythical $0.40 gallons with a sort of starry-eyed wonder and a cynical grumble about paying nearly 25% of my wages for gas.*
Nevertheless: as is the way with these things, I now long for the days of $1.26 gasoline. With the current size of my gas tank (I'm now feeding a smaller car, a lady by the name of Sexy Sadie), I could be saving $23.52 per tank! In practical terms, that is a week of groceries. It is another tank of gas. Perhaps most importantly, it is two cases of Miller High Life: The Champagne of Beers.
So, while I cannot take a time machine³ back to what now seem like the good ol' days, I can develop strategies for saving money on gas in the present. This will benefit me in these last few weeks of my job (where I'm attempting to conserve as much money as I can), and again upon the actual embarkation of my life and I eastwards.
In the interest of this endeavor, I have discovered the following website:
Gasbuddy.com
inter your nets, heat-mappin your gas
This view is wicked cool, because it gives you up to date (within 48 hours) gas prices to help plan your route (should you, like me, need to plan a big route). But wait! That's not all:
Mama always taught me to comparison shop. Dad always taught me
to remember that it ain't worth it if you have to drive to Beaverton.
The website zooms (like all good websites do these days) and will show all the gas stations where you live. I now have confirmation that my gas station is the cheapest gas station, and can re-confirm as necessary.
Operation Save Gas Money to Spend on More Gas: underway!
Notes:
* To be fair, my father also regaled me with stories about siphoning gas from police vehicles, and by the time Jimmy Carter was done with captaining the good ship America, gas had leapt up to $1.25 (that's like, a 310% increase!°), so it's clear that my understanding of gasoline's halcyon days was as unnaturally rose-tinted as Elton John's sunglasses.
° Mathematical figures are not necessarily accurate, as this particular author's history with grown up math had the following highlights: Math for Liberal Arts (read: movies about fractals, no actual math); Classical Physics: Energy and Motion (in which we read Galileo, and watched videos of Stephen Hawking rapping. No numbers were involved), studying for the GREs (flashcards with the Pythagorean theorem on them).
³ Although were I to find a Time Machine, particularly in Hot Tub form, I would totally hop in.
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