Getting better and better

In the summer of 03, I was having lots of problems.  I was very frustrated over my inability to think, process information, and retain it.  I was aware that just a few short months before that, I was teaching, a full-time grad student working on my PhD, and doing all that went with it.

But that summer, I could barely comprehend a sentence, let alone a paragraph, let alone read a sociological journal article.  I would open my own texts and try to decipher my own marginal notes and give up, at a loss for what I wrote and what it meant.  I would attempt to write friends email, and I would have to labor over a simple note for hours.  Sometimes, even then, the notes were full of tangents and barely made sense.

Today, I picked up a book of logic puzzles that I've had sitting around for over a year (actually, closer to two, as I think I got it right around Christmas 2003).  I remember that I was so frustrated because I stumbled over them and could not solve any of the puzzles, even the more simplified ones.  So, I held my breath and opened the book.

Well, the first two I solved with minimal efforts.  The next two I did in pen.  No mistakes.  What was even better was that I began to feel that sense of enjoyment I had always associated with challenging my mind and then meeting that challenge.

For those of you who don't know, these logic puzzles are the sort that are word problems related to elimination and multi-tasking.  For instance, matching the five people up with their professions, which yoga class they took, and for how long, based on several clues that are given.

So, one such statement that is helps might say:  "The attorney's karma workshop lasts longer than Will's course (which isn't the shortest)."  Which one of the five people is the attorney?  Well, not Will.  Which also means that Will did not take the karma course.  Also Will did not have the shortest course (which was 6 weeks), meaning that the attorney could not have taken the shortest course nor the next to shortest course (cuz it has to be longer than Will's and he did not take the shortest course).  Will cannot take the longest course either, as the attorney's course is longer than Will's.

That sort of thing is called a logic puzzle.  There are other logic puzzles as well.  It is this type of which I have always been fond (well, except for that timeperiod when I had a hard time functioning at all).

Glad to be back in the running, of some sort, anyway.