Had to escape, the city was sticky and cruel.

My parents have had a Toyota Prius for a couple of years now. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to loving a car. Honestly. For although I do love the romantic idea of the open road, I’ve seldom actually loved the act of getting out there and driving on it (excepting the occasional road trip with friends). Guess I just get bored too easily, not to mention that I succumb to road rage too readily. Hence, since turning 16 and getting my driver’s license, cars have never really held any deep fascination for me.

But if I have to be driving, man I like driving that little car. Not only because it turns heads and everyone wants to talk about it (“Dude, I’ve been on a waiting list for one of those for like a year now!”), but because a single glance at the multi-purpose touch screen control panel consistently confirms that I’m getting upwards of 50 miles to the gallon. And that makes me happy. I love the fact that I don’t own a car and that I manage to live most of my life without ever needing to drive one, but on the occasions when I do need to be driving (damn you, suburban sprawl), I like knowing that I’m doing what I can to reduce my fossil fuel consumption. You can keep your honkin’ SUVs (and let’s not even talk about the freaks that drive those fucking obnoxious Hummers—it’s all I can do to keep from vomiting on them when I see them parked anywhere); I’ll take that totally geek-chic little hybrid any day.

However, I’ve noticed that since they’ve been driving it regularly, my folks have developed an interesting little hybrid-driving compulsion: they actually seem to be competing over who can get the best gas mileage! I wish I were kidding. You see, that damn little touch-screen has a variety of displays you can choose from in order to constantly track your fuel consumption (or lack thereof), and so my parents use it as some sort of barometer that displays not only who is the more accomplished driver of hybrid cars, but in some way, who is the more accomplished human being. Thus, much in the way a driver of an automatic transmission gets to know their car’s gear shifting tendencies and manipulates them with the subtle pressing and releasing of the accelerator, so too do my parents manipulate the way the car switches between its gas and electric engines. Were you to watch them while they drove, you would notice that one eye is trained on the energy consumption display at all times, and believe you me, they are adjusting their driving according to what they see there.

Doesn’t sound so bad initially, but I’m telling you, it really is a sickness. Mark my words: in a decade, there’ll be chapters of Obsessive Hybrid-Drivers Anonymous cropping up all over the country. A good day for my dad is when he can make the final mile back to their house without causing the car to switch over to its combustion engine even once. Nevermind the fact that in order to do so he backs up traffic behind him for miles, and should an unfortunate deer or other wildlife appear in front of the car (they live in a very rural area), it’s getting tapped out of the way (for there’s no way he’s going fast enough to actually kill the thing).

And don’t even get me started on my mom. On one of our final trips together with her behind the wheel, she nearly gave me whiplash in her attempts to manipulate the poor, confused vehicle’s finely tuned engine processes. I finally realized what the hell she was doing when I noticed that she was looking at the stupid touch screen instead of at the road. So I reached over and turned the screen off, nearly giving her a panic attack. And now if we have to go anywhere together, I run out to the garage and plant myself on the driver’s side of the car before she can even get out of the house. It’s like some twisted game of shotgun.

So when I return to their house from a day of driving the enabler of their obsessive-compulsive tendencies, my parents chide me for having only averaged 47.8 miles to the gallon.

And when I’m driving with my mom in the car, I make sure to ask her if she’s enjoying her whiplash-free ride in the Prius.

And I guess that’s the unfortunate solution: if I’m with them and we need to get somewhere in a timely and relaxed fashion, I’m the designated driver. And we all know how much I love that.

Or I suppose we could just pile into the SUV.