LittleWyvern.com

Everything is Numb3rs.

I completed the 100th and final Sudoku puzzle in Brain Age last week. Having invested so much time and attention to Sudoku my brain naturally found it difficult to suddenly stop playing. Even though the game is back in it’s case, tucked away inside a drawer, I can’t stop thinking about it. More specifically, I can’t stop thinking about the numbers.

1 – 2 – 4 – 7 – 5
That leaves 3 – 6 – 8 – 9

2 – 5 – 6 – 9
That leaves 1 – 3 – 4 – 7 – 8

It’s automatic and uncontrollable. My brain chooses random digits from 1 to 9 and I know by instinct which digits remain, reciting them silently. The process occurs over and over as a personal torment; given a set of numbers i am compelled to complete the set in the way another might be forced to compulsively wash his hands. Over and over and again. For a few nights I have actually been kept awake in bed while I thought of nothing but numbers. I would find new ways to group and count them ( I could pair the numbers: 25 – 17 – 38 leaves 49 and 6 ). I mentally arrange the digits in rows and columns and boxes and see how neatly they fit together. It sucks.

Fortunately, the compulsive counting is gradually subsiding. I haven’t played Sudoku in several days now. The whole situation is a little bit scary, but mostly just annoying. A few years ago I went through a phase where I played Text Twist on a daily basis. I assume you’ve played it, but if not it is necessary to explain that Text Twist is a game where you are given a set of letters and must use those letters to build as many words as possible. It is a combination of Scrabble and Boggle and an old-fashioned Word Jumble or Anagram. At any rate, after playing the game so relentlessly my mind fell into the habit of collecting and analyzing letters and words. I would sit idly while my brain picked a word, broke it into its component letters, and then rearranged them to build new words. Again, I lost several hours of sleep to the compulsion. Without realizing it I would occasionally phase out of a conversation and instead play with the letters to an interesting word I had heard. This became a significant problem for me and ultimately I forced myself to quit playing Text Twist. After about a week the letter and spelling nonsense went away.

In other news I finally bought a plane ticket back to Las Vegas. Just two more weeks.