a confession

I have a new addiction. I will blame it first on Brain Age, a game to which Ryan's mother introduced me. Little math problems, desiring a quick reaction, watching for speed and flawlessness. And on the flight back from New Orleans, I convinced Kelly to teach me how to play Sudoku. Now I'm fully addicted to these little puzzles; my grandmother loves them too. A few visits ago, she challenged my father to a speed solving of the day's Sudoku, and she managed to beat him, a man I always considered a human calculator.

It is no surprise that I did not do well on the math portion of the GRE. Numbers have become more and more elusive for me. I was relieved that my husband did our taxes this year, saving me the tantrum throwing frustration of all the oddly worded questions and secret investments I couldn't begin to understand.

Give me words, let me celebrate sentence diagramming, line breaks, the use of literary devices. Let me pull volumes from my bookshelf and immerse myself in new worlds. And every once in a while, I'll exercise that long neglected numbers part of my mind.