Car issues.... again

So much has happened in the last several weeks... I'm going to separate the three major things into three separate posts. The first is about my car..

On my way up to the apartment several weeks ago my car's exhaust decided to break. Everything was fine until I stopped at a red light. When I hit the gas to go again I could hear very loud exhaust - I thought to myself "Is that me?!" I let off the gas for a second and sure enough it stopped. I looked in my mirror to see if my muffler had fallen off but I couldn't see anything there (however it was dark so even if it had fallen off I may not have been able to see it..). I will also comment at this time that some people had severely irritated me by tailgating me very closely - when we stopped at the red light they were so close to me that I thought they were gone; I couldn't see their headlights at all! When I looked closer I could see them in the car though. I drove the last 5 minutes to the apartment very carefully and made it there fine. When I looked under my car later I saw that the exhaust under the driver's section of the car had come apart and was hanging down, but not touching the ground. Matt had wanted me to use my car a couple times over the weekend and thank God I didn't. When I went to leave on Monday I didn't even get by the next building and I could hear the exhaust pipe scraping on the ground. A couple people came over to look and a guy broke it off for me so I could manage to get home. The piece must have been almost two feet long. He told me to drive with my windows down so carbon monoxide wouldn't build up in the car - that was one COLD drive home... I wore my hood up the whole way! And might I say it was embarrassing too? People would turn to look as I went by. And I tried to be really careful; if a car was coming I would temporarily let my foot off the gas until I was sure it wasn't a cop. :-P But I made it home and my Dad kindly used the credit card to have the parts replaced the very next day.
Now, however, I'm not sure that the water pump we replaced several weeks before my exhaust problem is the right one.. The guy at the parts store said it wasn't the same pump that was in my car before but that it should fit. But now my car will start to get hot when driving in certain conditions; for example when going slow through the stupid ass construction going on right in front of where I work... It hasn't overheated yet, but it gets pretty close. So we will see how that goes. My dad says that he's getting sick of fixing something in it every few weeks - he thinks I should just go for a new car! Which I might. :-) I set up a carfinder thing on St. J Auto's website to e-mail/call me whenever they get in a Subaru Baja that is 2004 or newer with less than 50k miles on it. So we will see!