Every person wants to be interesting in their own way. Rarely—almost never—will you discover someone who truly, unironically wants to be uninteresting. In a postmodern culture, being “boring” has in a way become a persona people take on, especially as the current cultural fad is to be nonchalant. People like to hide behind the façade of being boring to cover their insecurities about their own interests, as if they won’t be “cool enough.” But in reality everybody has the mental picture of how they want others to perceive them.
College is the ultimate workshop for building a persona. You’ll find all kinds of personas, such as the “film guy,” or the “DJ guy,” or even the “Super Smash Bros guy.” Sometimes the persona is broad (like “sports”), but sometimes the persona is very specific (see “Super Smash Bros guy” above). Some people find it right away; some people need to give it a few tries. But the best personas are the ones that come naturally. They come from something that an individual does because they love it. There’s no trial period, it just happens. These are typically the most genuine and physical (as opposed to ideological).
For Jake Lancaster, he’s sort of become one of the “car guys” at Union. You’ve most likely seen him, even if you didn’t know it was him. He currently drives a 1986 Porsche 944, a sleek black vintage sports car that he fixed up himself. Jake and I overlapped at the Augustine School: a small, classical Christian school here in Jackson. That’s where I first interacted with him and got to see the beginning of his persona building.
When Jake turned 16, he was given a 2006 Mercedes Benz ML350. It was a luxury SUV, but it needed a lot of work. His grandfather had given it to him, and this is where it all started.
“It was a pretty good car. But mine specifically had some issues. So, you know, that’s kind of where it all started,” Jake said. He told me more about how he had to replace some important parts, like the alternator, which forced him, as he said “by necessity,” to learn how to work on cars.
Jake’s dad, Scott Lancaster, works at Union University in the University Communications office, and also happens to be in the same church small group as my family. I got to talk with Scott about Jake’s love of cars and compare their stories. They were strikingly similar.
“For as long as I could remember, he has been fascinated by trying to figure out how things work. So he was constantly taking apart things, and he would make crazy contraptions,” Scott said. He told me about how as a kid, Jake would take apart broken appliances to try to figure out how they worked and why they had stopped working. Jake joked about how he wouldn’t always clean up the dissembled appliance and that (probably) dismayed his parents.
Part of what makes Jake’s persona as “the car guy” so genuine and interesting is that he truly loves doing it. Sometimes people create a persona that they don’t necessarily like but that is cool and popular and therefore feels worth it. This is not the case for Jake. For most, car trouble and mechanical work is stressful and feels out of their control. But for Jake, he willingly takes in vehicles that need work. I was most curious if Jake found his work relaxing.
“Yeah, I find it relaxing most of the time,” Jake said. I asked him if there were parts of it that he didn’t find relaxing, and he told me that sometime when he rushes himself, he gets frustrated or discouraged. He even mentioned there were a few times during his Porsche project that he got frustrated by little things that would just not quite work right.
Jake’s crowning achievement (in my opinion), is the old Porsche 944 that he purchased and restored. When he purchased it, it didn’t run and was missing different body panels that had to be replaced. He had to remove the engine and rebuild it, as well as replace a bumper and some other components. The engine rebuild is a huge task, and Jake slowly knocked it out, spending Sundays from after church until 8 p.m. meetings working on it at his family’s home off campus. It took him a while, but he fell in love with the car and the work itself. Jake told me that he had sort of initially planned on restoring the Porsche to resell, but after working on it and driving it, decided he wanted to keep it. And rightly so. As we talked, it became apparent that for Jake the most rewarding part of the work is getting to see the car slowly come back to life as you restore it.
Jake’s persona as “the car guy” has brought about different things across campus. His Porsche is a work of art and catches the eyes of a lot of people, which sometime leads to short, but pleasant conversations with people that Jake doesn’t know. He enjoys getting to share his interest with people.
“I’ve worked on my roommate’s cars, over the years, even like earlier this year,” Jake said. “I guess it may have been last semester. I replaced the brakes on my roommate’s girlfriend’s car. That was pretty easy—brake jobs are normally pretty easy.”
I wanted to get an idea how often he was asked to do mechanic work for students across campus, and he told me that he mainly did work for his roommates and other people that he’s close to. One thing that Jake really likes about having fixed up the Porsche to roadworthy quality is that it allows him to loan out his Mazda 3 (the car he had between the Mercedes and the Porsche) to people who need a vehicle for a little while theirs is in the shop.
“You know J-Mac, his GTI, he got hit by a deer one time, so I let him borrow my Mazda for a week or two. Just cause, you know, most people don’t have two cars on campus. I’m more capable, I’m in a position where I can loan my car and not be affected, so I try to help out in that way. I’ve done that probably three times at this point with different people,” Jake said.
Jake loves cars and working on them, but he also loves people and understands that his hobby has given him the unique ability to help people who are in a pinch. Ever since I’ve known Jake, even in high school, he has been an incredibly good dude, and it’s fun to see that shine through as a “car guy” at Union.