We have a tendency to take things for granted as we grow older. When we’re younger, we’re often so busy growing up that we forget how important the little things are in life. Your outlook on life in your late teens/early 20s is drastically different from when you reach your 30s, and if you aren’t there yet, believe us—shit changes quick. It’s always best to do as many different things as possible when you’re younger; there’s less to worry about, more risks to take, less to lose out on…the world is your oyster, as they say. Life teaches you valuable lessons, good and bad, and then sometimes you realize the good is never as good as you thought it’d be, and the bad, well, the bad is much worse. Crazy, right?
For car enthusiasts, life, seemingly, also imitates art. As you get older, (hopefully) you start to make more money and have more available options to you. As a teen, you wanted that Civic so badly; it didn’t matter what the condition, you just wanted one to lower and show off to girls. What happens when you get older? That’s right, you want more. S2000? NSX? Hell, screw all that, you probably want an Evo or STI. Civics don’t mean shit to you anymore. Then you tend to look at the youngsters with an almost jaded point-of-view. It’s “kid-stuff” and their modifications that inevitably turn into mistakes makes you think that you are better than them. That’s not really the case though. You’re better in the sense that you’ve gradually become more knowledgeable than them. You aren’t really better than them per se, you’re just more experienced. There was a point in time when you made the same mistakes but you just grew and learned from them. You’re the vet while these young kids are the new fish. Suddenly, cleaning your car for local meets and car shows have also jaded you in a sense. “Been there, done that,” you say. Think back to back in the day; you went “just because”—and it was all good. Why are we in such a rush to grow up, even with our car lives? You should be enjoying all the time you spent to make your car so right.
Cooper Boudia hasn’t hit that point in his life yet where everything has become a pain in the ass. If anything, he’s living it up. He spends his days ordering baristas around at Starbucks where he is a supervisor, and occasionally uses lame coffee-related puns to talk to attractive young ladies. When he’s not at work, he spends all of his time working on his 1998 Acura Integra. It would be very cliché to say that his Integra was never meant to get to this point of modification, but it’s true. Working at Starbucks doesn’t yield the type of income to find a mint condition Integra Type R, so he took whatever he made and built himself a “poor man’s ITR”.
“This Integra was the first car that I purchased on my own, with my own money,” Cooper says. “I got really lucky and found a completely stock, well-maintained DC2 with a clean title and a single owner. I bought a few things for it, and, of course, one thing led to another and I got hit with the bug hard.”
Cooper is one of those guys that would go just about anywhere for a car-related event. “Too far” is definitely not a part of his vocabulary. We had already had an eye on his build for quite some time now, but it wasn’t until a recent annual anniversary meet of one of the most popular online blogs (*ahem* shameless plug for stickydiljoe.com) where we managed to get in touch with him. We forgot to mention that this event took place in Southern California. Cooper only had to make the 2,252 mile round-trip adventure to meet us. He didn’t necessarily make the trip just to land on the pages of Super Street either.