I used to drive a PT Cruiser. The why isn’t important. But what’s important is how much having a PT Cruiser began to affect my life. And it wasn’t necessarily positive.
No one who saw the car could refrain from commenting.
I had friends that thought it was straight up hilarious and made jokes regularly.
I had friends that actually refused to be seen in the car at all, for any reason.
I found driving the PT Cruiser to be problematic as well. It had a barely discernable turning radius. It couldn’t accelerate. Other cars seemed to pull out in front of my car with a suspicious frequency.
And it had a ton of problems that were somehow hidden below the surface enough to be indescribable to mechanics, but real enough on the road.
In a perfect world, owning a type of car different from other types of cars would be no big deal, but in this world where public perception influences us more than we think, the kind of car we’re driving around in does matter.
Being single is a lot like owning a PT Cruiser.
Your marital status is by turns offensive, hilarious, anxiety-producing, and personally problematic. You can even become a bit paranoid, assuming all bad things that happen are because everyone knows you’re single.
Most troubling of all, for me, is that any chance I take to make fun of my own relational status gets mistaken as a plea for a spouse. As if it is impossible to enjoy the comical adventures that is the single life.
That’s why Jana and I are here.
When I had my PT Cruiser I was the only person I knew that had one under the age of 60 (another parallel?). I had no one who could relate to me. PT Cruisers were big for people vacationing, and they were great for the elderly, but after awhile I really started to think all the issues I had with the car were mine and mine alone.
It’s just not the case. You’re not crazy. We’re not crazy. The only people who are crazy are those who never wonder if they are.
So Jana and I are would like to share with you those little clinks and screeches that go with being single. Maybe you’ve got the same issues, or maybe you just want to hear a new perspective on something you find funny, offensive, or awkward.
We’re more than pleased to be part of the conversation either way.
Thanks for joining us!
Lots of love and empathy, and a spoonful of irony,
Katrina and Jana
Notes from the Sea 
My mom used to date a guy that drove a PT Cruiser when my brother and I were teenagers. He was a really good guy, had a successful career working as an accountant in Marin, lived in the nice, classy part of Fresno (yes there were a few blocks like that), a great cook, funny, generous, and also owned a beautifully-kept red 70’s T-top Corvette. Every time we’d see him, my brother would tease him about his corvette and his thinning hair… for years. We’d go over to his house to eat duck he roasted on his backyard patio while he talked about turning his garage (where the corvette lived) into a studio for me for college and my brother would be at the same old shtick about how going bald and driving a PT Cruiser was indescribably lame. The guy took it all in stride, although it was never funny or original, and no real definition of why either of those was so comical ever surfaced in years of my brother’s adolescent jeering. When I was around 15, he let me drive the PT Cruiser, which honestly was a pretty cool thing to do before even before I had my permit, and later, I got to drive the Corvette, too. My brother, on the other hand, got to drive jack squat. 🙂
tl;dr People who make fun of PT Cruisers, balding, and singleness, are teenage boys who won’t get to drive corvettes.
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I love this story! I think if you own a PT Cruiser you definitely are the kind of person who has learned to take the childishness of others in stride, and someone who also knows how to find worthwhile friends to keep around!
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