Puzzles

This isn't a post about sudoku. This is a post about how I think.

Yesterday I decided to try solving a sudoku for serious.

I erased through the paper.

Today I had a better plan. I found some graph paper and settled down at the mostly-clean dining room table.

Hey, wanna see a clean dining room table? This doesn't happen in our condo often; I usually share Erma Bombeck's attitude toward tables and call them "flat filing cabinets".

Anyway now it has my leather jacket (don't know how it made it onto the table) and a few toques and some letters I haven't finished addressing sitting on it.

And, me and my clever approach to sudoku.

Confidence level: 100%.

My plan is so simple. I really am a genius. I'll just redraw it every time I make a mistake. If I do make a mistake.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes? I don't know how long later, I felt that my method was working.

Confidence level: 80%

It's tough, but I'm making headway. I mean, I've got a whole 2 filled in.

I keep working. My confidence surges. I am a wizard. I can feel my neuroplasticity increasing. I am staving off Alzheimer's. I am preventing this weird thing I do where I say the wrong word like "skydiving" instead of "hot air ballooning" (true story, also, just now, I forgot the word "skydiving" completely and had to ask Hawk what that thing is where you jump out of a plane. That is the sort of thing I thought my sudokoing was fixing.)

Confidence level: 800 000%. HECK YEAH

Then I saw it and no matter what I did, there was nothing I could do about it.

Confidence level: Germans 2 minutes before the end of the battle of Vimy Ridge

Oh well. I'm a trooper I guess.

Confidence level: 10%, stubbornness level: Hawk

So I start solving my puzzle again, referring to the one above for mistakes uhh, NEVER. Which was the point of having it there, to check to see what I did ... oh well. Yay me. Then, using my razor-sharp logical reasoning skillz (see that zed? yeah.) I discovered something important and amazing that made me feel brilliant! Genius! Neuroplasticity ENGAGE!

The 1 in the middle of the bottom square is where that arrow is pointing, bitchez!

I WAS ON FIRE! SUDOKU MASTER!

Then this.

I quit

I had too many eights. I couldn't figure out anything else to put in the top left of the centre square. Everything in the world was a mess. My brain was a solid mass of neurons that would never form new connections. I'd never know the right word ever again, and I'd probably have to continue speaking in Italian hand gestures for the rest of my life. Also, I was very cold because I was wearing my pajama shorts and I really needed to be wearing pants.

Fin