Every day as a part of her morning routine, my grandma reads the LA Times while eating breakfast and drinking a cup of instant coffee with milk. I thought for sure that paper prints would have gone out of business by now, but I’ve grown to kind of like the fact that this tradition didn’t die off so fast. Now, instead of going on Reddit or Youtube during breakfast, I work on the Sudoku puzzle in the Calendar section almost every morning. My grandpa used to love doing Sudoku, so I guess it’s a tiny way for me to relate to him beyond the grave.

For those of you that have never done Sudoku before, there are really only two levels of difficulty that I like to call easy and fuck-I-have-to-guess. Easy puzzles can be solved step by step using pure logic. Oh, 4 can’t go in these other 8 squares, so it has to go in this square. The other 8 numbers can’t go in this square, so 6 has to go here. So on and so forth until the entire puzzle is complete. Really, the only way to mess up is to accidentally read or write the wrong number in whichever box.

Fuck-I-have-to-guess puzzles require an extra step. Most numbers can be found with pure logic, but eventually a point is reached where more than one number can potentially fit in each box. No matter how hard I try to rationally figure out which direction to go, I can’t go any further without choosing a number. Obviously some boxes are more helpful than others, but often times it’s difficult to tell until I make a decision and find out the consequences.

Recently, my life situation has started to feel quite a bit like a fuck-I-have-to-guess puzzle, but with much greater consequences and minimal chances to erase my mistakes down the line. Pure rationality cannot lead me to the best answer, so I must make a decision and stick with it to find out in the end. It’s absolutely terrifying, and each direction has its associated pains and rewards that unravel over time.

With the window of decision making rapidly closing and second guesses popping up, I’ve been wallowing in dread for the past few days trying to solidify my direction. Who knows what will come out of all of this, but staring into the void has at least made me extremely aware of what I am getting myself into. With everything in mind, it all comes down to my decision… Hopefully it’s a good one!