I am a slave to the streak.
My New York Times crossword puzzle streak is the last thing I think about before I go to bed, sometimes the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning.
Users have until midnight Pacific time to complete a puzzle on the crossword app—which is free to download, though a supscription costs around $40 a year—for it to count toward the streak. New puzzles go live at 10 p.m. the night before (earlier for the tougher weekend puzzles). The puzzles get more difficult as the week goes on—Monday is the easiest, Saturday is the hardest and Sunday is on the same level as a Wednesday or Thursday, though it’s about twice as long as a typical puzzle. Most nights I lay in bed, the light from my phone illuminating my face, fingers tapping from clue to clue.
I usually finish Monday and Tuesday crosswords when the puzzles are posted, and often Wednesdays, but I mostly have to work on Thursday’s puzzles and onward throughout the day and into the night. More than once I’ve found myself hunkered down in a bar bathroom stall at 1:30 a.m., clutching my phone and trying frantically to come up with a nine-letter response for 65-across, “Get through lines quickly” (SPEED READ, Aug. 5) or 13 letters for “Challenge with gusto” (DOUBLE DOG DARE, Dec. 2).
My obsession started during my senior year at Steinert High School in Ms. Balfe’s first period Advanced Placement American government class. We started most days by reading our own copies of The New York Times, but if we got to class with enough time before the bell rang, a handful of us would try the puzzle. I first stuck to Mondays—done only in pencil —and started to get the hang of it. I think a big part of crossword success is learning the most common three- and four-letter filler words (alee, asea, ell, Esau, any kind of directional like ESE, epee, Uta, Roman numerals).
My New York Times crossword puzzle is the last thing I think about before bed, and the first thing I think about when I wake up.
Once I had a grasp on those, I’d try to beat the clock and solve before class started. I tried Tuesday puzzles, and then Wednesdays, and even a few late-weekers. I still have the first Thursday puzzle I ever completed. Then I started getting an NYT crossword desk calendar every year, on top of day-specific and themed puzzle books. It turned into a fun, stimulating way to wind down.
And then I downloaded the app about a year ago.
The streak was enough to keep me obsessed (my longest is 13, which pales in comparison to some of the year-long streaks I’ve seen in the online crossword community), until I learned that the app also tracks other stats, like solve time by day (my fastest is 4:04, on a Monday puzzle) and solve percentage (I’m at 81.3 percent).
One of my all-time favorites is a puzzle from last November that had a Battleship theme—the theme clue (10 letters) read “It’s four units long in a popular board game (with the game’s other pieces hinted at by the circled letters).” X’s filled out all those circled letters, and the number of X’s corresponded to a ship in the board game. So 17-across, “1984 Schwarzenegger sequel,” read CONAN THE XX— or Conan the Destroyer, since the destroyer piece in Battleship is two slots long. I literally fist-pumped when I figured this out.
The app also offers a mini puzzle every day, usually a 4×4 grid. I think my fastest solve time for one of those is 16 seconds, but I’ve seen people say they’ve sovled these in 10. I have no idea how this is possible. Same with people who solve the full-size puzzle with sub-3 minute times. Are they immune to typos? Are their fingers the width of a single piece of spaghetti? The closer I get to a personal best, the faster I type, and the more crazed/prone to typos my fat thumbs become. What’s a four-letter word for I hate this app?
But the worst (best?) part of it is that I don’t actually hate it. I enjoy the challenge, and I like pushing myself, even if it’s just to finish a crossword puzzle that has absolutely no bearing on anything important in my life. Setting a new personal record feels like an accomplishment, even if it has turned something that most people do for fun into a constant, bloodthirsty competition with myself. And ultimately, I am just doing this for fun.
But if I don’t get this streak to 20, I’m throwing my phone into the Delaware.
She Said, She Said is Samantha Sciarrotta’s monthly column for the Hamilton Post.,
