If I were to think of a single word to describe me, “scholar” wouldn’t be it. Throughout my school years, studying mathematics or writing a long thesis would require a level of focus that, at the time, I never believed I possessed. Lectures would waff in through one ear and rocket out of the other like oxygen being sucked out through a hole in the space station. My classroom notes contained more drawings than words and I had so many zeros in the grade books that it was presumed that I was partially comatose.

Somehow, I managed to graduate.

I wasn’t completely brain dead, though. By the age of 15 I had discovered that subjects such as architecture, astronomy, computers, and business lit a fire inside of me. I started a web design business at 15, a software company at 18, and now do web development full time, which allowed me to move over here. I finished a book on LLC/Corporate law in a day and it was one of the best reads I’d had in a while. Who knew lawyers could be funny? I just had to find what interested me and go after it.

But nothing has prepared me for the level of hell I’ve stumbled into now. What could be another canto in the Divine Comedy if it hadn’t given Dante such nightmares that it couldn’t be scribbled to paper is now my vacation spot within the inferno. You guessed it, I’m studying for my Italian driver’s license.

DUM DUM DUUUUUUUUUM

Not since sitting in Ol’ Lauderdale’s Algebra II class on exam day have I felt like such a moron. A foolish assumption that after having driven for a decade that learning the road laws over here would be a piece of cake, but I have been proven wrong. Compared to the US equivalent, the driving test here reads more like an entrance exam for MIT.

Allow me to elaborate with some examples of the more choice questions:

1) What might a sign mean? Not what does it mean, there is a huge difference.
2) What sign might be accompanied with another sign?
3) Does one sign appear before or after another sign? For instance, does a yield sign appear before or after a railroad crossing sign at a track crossing?

And then there are the infamous intersection questions:

Who goes first?

What’s on second?

I don’t know’s on third.

Pray for me.