I view myself as imaginative and for the most part unconventional and artistically inclined, but with an analytic mind. For the most part I strive for a balance but sometimes, taking after my father, my thinking becomes too concrete.

I’m also an extremely visual person, which explains why, of the five serious boyfriends I’ve had (’serious’ being exclusive for more than a year), three were involved with filmmaking and one was a painter. The other was an actor who taught me a lot about, yes, film. (In any given room, I can find the filmmakers and the non-single men based purely on whom I’m attracted to and who is attracted to me.)

It’s not that I don’t understand nuance or undercurrents or subtext. It’s just that I’m generally too clumsy and too direct to engage skillfully in such sophisticated maneuvers. Instead, I admire it greatly in others. And in films. And novels. It’s not that I can’t project ahead or anticipate or deduce, it happens that I am occasionally hyper-aware of what’s actual.

Concrete + Visual = difficulty seeing beyond what’s in front of you. This is why I’m awful at chess. Why I will never be a world-class multi-tasker. Why I spell slowly if I must do it out loud instead of on paper.

My last serious boyfriend and I used to joke sometimes that I was the guy and he was the girl because he would be dropping hints left and right and I remained oblivious. Also, he used to cook me dinner. My self-centeredness aside, he was at times far too subtle for me and I wished he could be more direct and assertive. One time I complained that he was “playing anagrams with me”, i.e. handing me a jumbled assortment and expecting me to make sense of it.

For the record, I adore crossword puzzles and Scrabble. ADORE THEM. But I suck at Boggle (he was really good at Boggle!) and, yes, anagrams. Any anagram longer than six letters, I have to sit and think for a while. My solving time decreases by half if I can use a pencil and paper.

My point is, please don’t hand me a jumble of letters; please hand me a word or a desire or a request or an opinion. If all you have is a jumble of letters, you should say so and we can figure it out together. I’m okay with sentence fragments or half-thought thoughts.

With crosswords, frequently when I’m stuck there is a wrong answer in the mix and I’m unable to imagine around it. Once I erase the wrong answer, several answers to other clues immediately occur to me. It’s like my mind was so tethered to those wrong letters it blocked out those other answers who were eagerly waiting in the wings. Even if I told myself to ignore what was written and think of any possible answers, regardless of whether or not they fit with what was there. I became more aware of this probably common phenomenon when I started doing puzzles in ink. For the most part I can work around the wrong answers, and then write over. But I still solve much faster with pencil.

[This is, by far, more boring information about me than you ever needed or wanted to know, but no one is forcing you to read this blog. Or if they are, I’m sorry and I hope you escape soon. Run towards populated areas.]