I have an expensive addiction and more than one girlfriend has broken up with me because of it. It’s gotten me into trouble with the law and has influenced my career. It isn’t smoking, alcohol or crystal meth. My fix is cars.

My obsession with the automobile started early in my childhood after my dad gave me that first Matchbox car. It was a metallic blue 1981 Citroen station wagon with four-wheel suspension and a rear hatch that could be opened.

Soon, I had a sizable collection of 1/64th scale exotic cars, followed by models and, after a few years, hand-built remote controlled cars with gas engines that never seemed to work quite right.

When I got my first car in high school, I immediately started “tweaking” it. This basically consisted of cutting non-essential parts off the car to make it faster. That’s about the point when my parents stopped thinking of my car obsession as being even remotely tolerable.

During the summer after high school, I somehow got a job selling cars at a dealership. I wasn’t a great salesman in the traditional sense, but I was just so damn excited every time I went on a test drive that customers couldn’t help but buy it.

I used the money I made to buy a Suzuki motorcycle, though I was fairly certain my mom was going to murder me. At first she tried to, but after I gave her a ride on it, she warmed up to the motorcycle – or at least stopped trying to set me on fire.

Seven cars and motorcycles later, I’m 23 and I figured I would do something productive with my addiction: Write an automotive column for the paper. It is more productive than doing donuts in the Assembly Hall parking lot and maybe it will get some of you hooked too.

Customers at the dealership used to ask me, “What is the best car in the world?” Really, it’s a subjective question that I couldn’t answer for them. But if pushed for an answer, it was and still is – hands down- the 1981 metallic blue Citroen station wagon sitting on my desk.

***Editor’s Note – This is the first column of a series relating to car culture, new vehicles, issues around campus, and buying and selling tips for the real world from a student perspective *****