The surest sign that a person has a large ego is that he does the crossword in pen.
I’ve done the crossword in the local newspaper on a regular basis for years, but I’ve found that I have to keep making it harder on myself in order to keep enjoying it. Initially it was as simple as not crossing off the clues I’d finished, but that’s no longer enough of a challenge; I’ve moved on to things like only filling in puzzles based on the “across” clues and doing them in spirals from the outside to the middle. Yet even with the extra level of difficulty, it’s a rare occurrence to take more than my seven-minute morning break to finish one off.
The most recent variations are two sides of the same coin: solving crosswords while driving (with someone else reading clues and filling in the puzzle—I may be crazy, but I ain’t stupid!) and solving them in my head, without filling in any of the squares. The experience of the former is sort of like playing a trivia game, except you get a bit of a sense of what sections of the puzzle look like and can use that to come up with answers. The latter is something I realized I could do while watching coworkers fill in puzzles; it’s become sort of a parlour trick at the office.
Lest this entry appear overly boastful—and with a quote like that at the top, how couldn’t it?—I freely admit that the Newsday crosswords are really pretty easy once you’ve gotten the hang of them. I haven’t gotten anywhere near this point on the New York Times weekend puzzle! But my experience does make me wonder if the reported benefits of this sort of activity start to tail off as the perceived difficulty does.