When I was a little kid, I loved the Find-A-Word puzzles in the paper.  As with any puzzle, you start to intuitively develop an algorithm of logic to quickly and systematically attack the challenge.  The most successful strategies with Find-A-Word, by the way, is to search for letters by their frequency (like Z, K, Q, etc) or double letters (OO or LL).

As my powers of English and logic improved, I naturally switched to a more challenging medium, crossword puzzles.  This happened somewhere in high school.  I remember sitting in my grandma’s small, cluttered but cozy room, and working them while we listened to old Elvis or Neil Sedaka on her small tape player. Every now and then, she’d sneak me some chocolate mini-muffins or Sam’s cola to re-ignite my brain power.

The big Sunday paper crossword puzzles were still beyond my powers because they were asking questions about pop culture that happened before I was born, sometimes by as much as 20 years before I was born.  Who the hell is Archie Bunker … and why should I care?

There is also a way of writing the clues that you can begin to easily decipher after working the crossword for a few hundred puzzles.  There is an inferred way of reading them that a novice is unable to immediately recognize.  Only experience and repetition will open up the secret language of the crossword clue.

The dominance of the crossword puzzle in my life was at its zenith in college with the O’Colley, the daily college paper at Oklahoma State.  I even had a crossword buddy, John, that I would meet when we woke at lunch in the fraternity with bed hair and in pajamas to grab two copies of the paper and racing through the crossword in about 75 seconds.  For someone that speaks in 40% profanity, John was surprisingly a good ‘wordin buddy.  That’s right, ‘wordin.

I loved doing crosswords so much that I’d take the in-flight magazine with me to complete the puzzle.  I’d buy crossword books and work them when I wasn’t asleep at my job.  I’d call up John after college and reminisce about the glory days.  When I’d visit Stillwater, I’d find a copy of the O’Colley just to work through the puzzle.  I loved them.

Then I moved to Australia.

Immediately, the doors fell off.  The dream was over.  There is a huge difference between Aussie English and American English.  Huge.  Insurmountable.  Let’s start at the basics – the alphabet.  Big differences already.  For instance, we say “ayche” for the letter H, they say “hayche”.  We say zee for the letter Z, they say zed.  You know how many times the crossword clue is 26th letter of the alphabet?  Do you know that putting a D in the third box will completely screw up the other clue?

Then there is the different lexicon of terms, jargon, and slang.  Best example is the word root.  In America, it means cheering.  In Australia, it means … um … humping.  The equivalent term in Australia to the Yankee word root is barrack.  I see advertisements on ESPN over here that ask me, “Who do you barrack for!”  Huh?

Did you know that an older Aussie term for food is tukka?  Huh?

Or that to eat-up can be said as tuk-in?  What?

To make matters worse, the cultural relativity is so different that I’m hopeless.  Their references are not to Senators or Presidents, but to ministers and PMs.  They aren’t talking about Days of our Lives or General Hospital, but Home & Away and Neighbours. Notice the different spelling on NeighboUrs?  Yep.

For example, here are three clues from a random paper that I picked up.  I challenge any Yank to get a right answer without resorting to Google.

1. Cook’s vessels found by taking two steps
2. Australian native tree
3. Cricket legend The Don

Any clues?  For any Aussies reading this, we know that you know these answers.  This is for Americans only.  For example, how many Aussies would know this one:

1. Star-crossed Cubs catcher with head phones?

Not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, eh?

The difference in moving to a new country has made the Australian crossword obsolete for me.  I have had to abandon a leisure passion due to the insurmountable cultural gap.  I could play online, but it really loses the fun of folding a paper down into a perfect square, taking a pen into the crapper and knocking out all the clues.

So …

I started playing sudoku.  Unfortunately, the skills that I have developed, perfected, and fine tuned with crosswords has no bearing on this numerical logic puzzle.  So I started banging my head on the wall as I sat on one cross-continental flight from Melbourne to LA trying to build the basic premise of an algorithm on how to solve it. It was my first attempt and I even drew out nine different version of the puzzle and started shading out boxes that had been eliminated from contention for that specific number (1-9).  It didn’t work and took forever.

I’m a writer, not a mathematician.  I’m a creative brain, not a stat brain.  I’m a lover, not a fighter.  I suck at this type of thinking … or rather … I have yet to develop any skills that would aid me in the completion and conquering of sudoku or even make me relavent in a water cooler sudoku conversation.

Case in point – recently, my in-laws had a barbeque that I attended over Easter.  The adults were more comfortable speaking Vietnamese … which I cannot speak.  To make matters worse, not only were they speakin gin Vietnamese, they were apparently talking about mortgage rates, which was already boring enough.  So I hung out with the youngsters, who preferred to speak English over the mother tongue.  As I was hanging out, we played a little numbers game and I lost every time.  The oldest child is 16, the youngest 6.

After an unhealty dose of self-introspection to my ownedness to a gaggle of teenagers and kids, one of my nieces, who I like to call Jen-Win (Jennifer Nguyen), reminded me – there was no chance of my winning a number game when I’m playing against Asians.  And she’s right.  When it comes to math, the fate of the world should be placed in the capable hands of Tran, Chin, and Mayamoto.

Even the name of the damn puzzle is Japanese.  When I get tired fruitlessly working the puzzle and my logic is flailing, the name of the puzzle seems to shift towards Sofuku.  It mocks me openly.  I can only take my ball point pen and jab into my eye.

I’ve gotten to wear I can struggle through the medium and lower difficulty sudoku puzzles, but my successful completion rate (while slowly climbing) is still at only about 45% overall.  I’m not proud of it, especially when I remember the glory days of tearing through the O’Colley with a mouthful of Miss Carolyn’s waffles and bacon at the Fiji house.

Oh crossword, oh crossword, I miss you so much.  Come back to me, please, come back.  I promise to sing every refrain from Waltzing Matilda before I attempt it if it will help me think like an Aussie.  I promise to freebase Vegemite.  I promise to grow a mullet and mustache and root for … er … barrack for the Blues.

Hell, I’ll even root them if it would help.