how my favorite celtic fixed things wtih my parents

Recently, I had a birthday. Although it was a bit anticlimactic, part of that reason is that my parents' generous offer to help pay for a car or bike purchase arrived in what I thought was just a card of some sort. Thus, I knew what the biggest birthday present of my life was before it even arrived. Unfortunately, this gift also led to some disagreement between myself and my mother regarding what sort of automobile I might wish to drive. See, of late, I have developed an abiding interest in doing something about my longstanding interest in forming a boy band. As such, it has come to my attention that the perfect car for me to own is a 2001 Mercedes-Benz SLK with about 60k miles on it. For any of you who didn't know, Mercedes is still a very legitimate name for your daughter and actually earns you no yuppie points, as the car was named for someone's daughter in the first place. If you are disappointed by this news, just remember that in general, last names and place names will earn you plenty of points. The SLK also seems to be a perfect answer to Bill Simmons' question about which modern vehicle is invariably driven by beautiful women and guys you want to beat up. I don't beat anyone up and I want to be in a boyband, so clearly this is the car for me.

I'm sure you may already have intuited that my mother did not agree that the SLK was the car for me. What you may not have known is that even my tactful failure to disclose the actual make and model of the $18k convertible I liked did not prevent a remark about how that was definitely not the sort of money my parents were willing to help provide. This also led to the inevitable comparisons to the 442 my parents owned when they were first married. I know a couple of things about this car: it was a convertible, my mother regrets the fact that it was ever purchased, it didn't last long, and a number of my parents' best 8-track tapes were stolen out of it while they were skiing. Those facts have led me to the following conclusions: convertibles are more versatile than many might guess, considering my parents were able to successfully drive a convertible american muscle car to and from a ski slope in the 70s; a hard top convertible like the SLK is a good idea, being more difficult to burglarize; and the people in this cautionary tale (my parents) were not bankrupted or (certainly in my father's case) permanently scarred by the experience of owning the vehicle in question.

Additional analysis has shown me why purchasing the used German vehicle in question would be not only more harmless than parental warnings have suggested, but could actually be beneficial to my social life. A lifetime of careful research into the history of certain individuals who raised me has shown that, while one of them may be ashamed of the other's having talked her into the purchase of a 442 in the early years of their marriage, she somewhat fondly remembers his ownership of a GTO during their college years. In fact, only with my in-depth historical knowledge of the situation was I able to dredge up this paradox. The same woman who once went out with a campus hero known to possess a GTO, only to find he was driving his mother's station wagon that year, resented this man's purchase of a 442 once they were married. Coupled with the following information - I am not married or in a relationship - this fact leads me to an important conclusion. I should totally buy the SLK, since not only will it further my professional goals, it will make other men jealous and will only lead to positive reminiscences from the woman I (theoretically at least date for a while at some point). Unfortunately, I did not have the time nor resources to come up with these life-altering conclusions during my phone conversation, which meant that my favorite celtic would still have to save my (soy-based) bacon.