Once you get to the phase of your life during which things become, well, repetitive, you tend to fall into a set routine. Part of my typical work commute involves reading the front section of the Chicago Tribune, then moving on to skim the sports pages’ baseball scores before opening the Tempo section and immediately folding the penultimate page in half with one forceful, yet gentle, motion and, without even glancing at the comics - OK, fine, sometimes I read ‘Get Fuzzy’ - beginning to solve the day’s crossword in my head. Without writing anything down. The aura of flat-out freaking brilliance surrounds me every morning as I step off the train, mitigated only by the fact that no one is paying attention.

The point here is that yes, I have my brain-teaser puzzle pastime. So when this freaking sudoku (or is it Sudoku? Dammit, I don’t even know if it’s capitalized) thing came along, threatening to usurp my beloved word game, I looked at it like I’ve looked at many other brash pop-trends-come-lately - liking Maroon 5, watching ‘Desperate Housewives,’ reading Harry Potter - namely, with complete disdain.

The only problem is that I ended up loving all of the above items. I will not do this with sudoku, which this morning I noticed was placed above the crossword in the RedEye. Above the crossword? Not on my train. Look at it! Witness its smarmy integers! A 16th-century Spanish cardinal of the Inquisition would have a field day enumerating the ways the devil is manifest in those ordered squares of numbers. I already have plenty of addictions, and I don’t need a number game clogging the brain pathways responsible for remembering a four-letter city in Oklahoma.*

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*Enid.