In real life, one of my friends was killed in a car accident during our sophomore year.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
I have a 15-year-old boy, and we are about to give him car keys, which seems like an act of insanity when you know what you know about 15-year-old boy behavior. But in 2018, we'll have self-driving cars, and it will be so much better. My son may be the last generation of kids who learns to drive.
We are, after all, a nation of laws. And we live in a culture where carrying a form of identification is as normal as keeping your car keys in your pocket. When any of us walk into a grocery store and cashes a check, no one skips a beat when asked to present our driver's license.
I once went to one of those parties where everyone throws their car keys into the middle of the room. I don't know who got my moped, but I drove that Peugeot for years.
Our children will outwit us if they want; for when it comes to technology, they hold the higher ground. Unlike other tools passed carefully and ceremonially from one generation to the next - the sharp scissors, the car keys - this is one they understand better than we do.
Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.
I can't find my car keys in the morning. Trying to get out of my house is a nightmare. 'Where's my wallet? Where are my keys? I have to go find a missing person.'
The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.
My worst habit is probably that I'm extremely messy. I'm a big scatter-brain - I'm always losing my car keys, or worse, forgetting where I parked my car in the car park.
I remember things that happened sixty years ago, but if you ask me where I left my car keys five minutes ago, that's sometimes a problem.
Many kids come out of college, they have a credit card and a diploma. They don't know how to buy a house or a car or health insurance or life insurance. They do not know basic microeconomics.
Our worst instincts as human beings have to do with our carelessness with natural resources, and when the body itself becomes just one more of those resources, how will we treat it? Will we treat it with such indifference and with such depersonalization that it becomes more like a very fancy car than a repository of the self?
You can't tell what's aboard a container ship. We carried every kind of cargo, all of it on view: a police car, penicillin, Johnnie Walker Red, toilets, handguns, lumber, Ping-Pong balls, and IBM data cards.
After I got popular, my company gave me a new car. It's not a personal car, but for schedule purposes. It's a little bigger than a Carnival. It even plays TV and DVD!
I remember driving to North Carolina when I was a little girl in a snowstorm to get down to my mom's family in the Carolinas. There were chains on the car - it was the late sixties - and we were just singing in the car. Christmas carols.
I used to look like a deer in headlights on the red carpet. You step out of the car and it's bedlam. Everyone's got crazy eyes.
Okay, let's talk about cartoon labels for half a second - some people think anything with a dog or a car or a colorful alien is garbage, which is not true. Look at Big Moose Red. It's, like, a $6 wine with a cheesy label, and it's actually a solid wine.
I still pinch myself that I have a second-hand Aston Martin DBS Volante, the convertible model of James Bond's car from 'Quantum of Solace' and 'Casino Royale.'
A few days after 9/11, I put the old cassette of 'Born in the U.S.A.,' twisted and worn, on the car deck as I drove past West Point, across the Bear Mountain Bridge, along the Hudson River. It was the perfect moment to hear it.
