cars are ick

So my car finally died...we were coming home from a movie on Sunday afternoon and while sitting at the intersection of Powell and 39th, something went "bang" and she started smoking. After hauling it over to the dealership, the bad news is it will cost more to repair than what I paid for the car to begin with, so it's time to move on.

What sucks is I don't even like driving, and I here I am, having to buy another car. It's a weird dilemma, but here's some of the reasons I can't just go carless (the way I'd like to):

#1 Job-I'm not even working right now, but eventually I'm gonna be done with all this school crud and start teaching somewhere, and knowing my luck, that somewhere will inevitably be as far away from where I live as is humanly possible. And that's assuming I can even get a job--I might be subbing, which definitely requires transportational flexibility. At the very least, I need to be able to go to job interviews. And even if by some miracle I do get a job somewhere bus-able, I still need to be able to haul all the crap around that teaching tends to generate.

#2 Can't drive stick-we have another vehicle but it's manual, and I can't drive stick to save my ever-loving-life.

#3 They actually have a lot of car-share options around here, which I'm really into, but that's not practical option for daily commuting--it's more of a solution for errands/out of town trips, and I don't live near any of the parking spots where you pick up the vehicles-they tend to be located closer to the central city.

The job is the main problem. If I had one already, I could probably figure something out (the way I always do), but I'm at the hunting stage, so I need to be pretty flexible and open-minded about driving over the county line. I wish there was a way to just borrow a car for 6 months, but if I want one at all, I'm pretty much stuck buying it-leasing is absurd. As a person who's not very excited about the prospect of driving to begin with, buying a car is a weird weird experience. I'm not really that excited about what's out there in my price range (a sea of run-of-the-mill former rental cars), I have no haggling skills but an over-developed bullshit-detector, and I absolutely hate talking to salespeople. I don't want an SUV, and I don't want something "girly". All I want is something relatively non-descript that I could park in any neighborhood, functional, something that gets decent gas mileage, and has enough room to haul crap and people around in (for future offspring). If it weren't for the gas prices, I'd just buy an old beat-up pickup truck. What I'd really like is a hybrid, but I can't afford one, and even if I could, there's waiting lists...urrgh. Like I said, I'm really not excited about buying a car, and kinda wish I could put it off for awhile, but this is a problem that's not gonna take "no" for an answer.