L is for Loser.

Or Lard.

With our summer (summer is a collegiate synonym for one month) break in, it was obvious (read: necessary) for me to enroll my more-than-lazy self into driving lessons and finally learn the art. Fart.

There are two types of car lovers out there;
(a) The ones that go crazy over cars and want to drive anything with wheels attached to them (even if it means their grandmother) and are more than knowledgeable about information like the make, specs, model numbers, origin, price, fuel consumption, mileage, number of airbags, percentage of infant mortality rate in that particular car and what not.
(b) And then there are my type. The ones who go, "Oooo, look at that car! Is that a BMW?" (Chances are it was probably a Tata Sumo)

I've never taken much interest in vehicles besides kick-scooters and younger cousins. I've never had the patience to remember the model numbers of anything in life. 3 series? Is that Nokia's new range of phones?
Numbers have always seemed to daunt me. I can barely remember two phone numbers before I have a system overload.

Anyway, similarly, I've never heeded the requirement to learn how to drive. I've always got by with public transport, carpooling, nice friends and mother dearest. I've always found myself venturing out into more useful ways of spending time. Such as having home-made challenges of maximum guava juice consumption in a single sitting or mastering MS Paint - blindfolded - or slightly more interesting events like taking facebook quizzes and answering lengthy questionnaires eventually to prove that I'm more feminine than I (and most people) think.
No, driving never seemed as important as any of the above enjoyable past-times. That's until it became a necessity.

With auto-rickshaw prices coming to levels that could possibly trigger my dormant asthma to return, and mother getting more and more irritable with her nearly 20 year old son begging her for a drop off at a buddy's place, it was clear that driving was the only way to stop the madness, the Sparta.

And so they've started and they've gone quite well. It's safe to say that I can comfortably drive around (with a legal license holder beside me) the place - sometimes with one/no hand/s on the wheel - and horn at J-walking pedestrians with relative ease.
My father hasn't offered me to drive the SUV yet. He's a man of 'time and place'. I think we both know that in this case, 'time and place' refers to 'no and never'. There's a glint of hope there that never dies, however.

Apart from the driving lessons, I've been spending my summer jamming with the band and explaining to people what Graphic Design is.

My usual tactic to answering their unsurpassable curiosity is to start with the very abstract and metaphorical or otherwise personal definitions for the term that you usually see on a lot of viral posters on the internet. "Graphic design is thinking made visual". "Graphic design is a cheeseburger". "Graphic design is what my mother tells her friends I do".
Witty, clever and usually inspiring to fellow members of the design world, the definitions aren't very friendly to the folk that are creatively challenged (those that need a logical definition for the universe and its contents). So I head for the definition about what graphic design is, according to Wikipedia of course (our everlong source of all things true) and at this point I've usually managed to confuse the poor soul even more. Now, when I know I'm at a good stage to brag about something I don't know too much about, I tend to take full advantage of it. In this case I spew in design-related lingo between every 3-4 words to throw people off. Words like: Gestalt, x-height, iStockPhoto and paresh usually work the best. Then for the final attack on the war of ignorance, I usually dive into competely alien topics like the importance of typography and begin lecturing about Helvetica, it's history and it's conflict with other sans-serif fonts like Arial. I also quote some very unimportant quotes from the Helvetica movie just to seem a little smarter.

"Wtf is a sans-serif? Isn't that one of your friends?"

By now, anyone who asks the next question either spaced out somewhere in between and is requesting permission to be excused to receive a phone call/visit the toilet/get the fuck away from you... or this person is actually interested in knowing more.
I'm yet to meet the latter.

It's strange. But being a design learner and argualby quite the enthusiast, it's hard for me to comprehend people who don't get my field. According to my father, I'm a communication designer, thus I should'nt be facing any problem in easily communicating what I do to people.
Sometimes, statements like these make you question many things.. starting with the evolution of man.

The rest of my holiday so far has been spent eating a little too much ice cream and downloading apps, widgets and other fancy things to customize my mac. I've also become quite the Twitter addict and you can follow me here if you're also a twit.
It's because of these various status update platform thingies that I'm beginning to become a blog-sloth. I promise to be more frequent with posts.

Like always...