Riding the bus has made me a sudoku-junkie. Yes, it's true. I once had a grip on the strangely pleasurable puzzle's influence over me. When it first appeared in the paper, I was compelled to play it every morning even before I read the funnies. But when I couldn't crack the harder sudokos after a few tries, my passion for the puzzle waned.

Thanks to the free but restricted time I have during the commute, I have had ample opportunity, and nothing better to do, so I gave the puzzle a whirl, for old time's sake. It stuck, mostly because nothing else quite works. Reading makes me carsick on every mode of public trasportation except for the subway. The radio signals aren't consistent, and besides my Walkman's too heavy when I have an iPod Shuffle (by far the best thing that came out of this bus experience except, I guess, for all that personal growth n' stuff). Meditation or sleep isn't possible when the gangbanger next to you is singing to his Madonna iTunes (true story!).

So imagine the bliss I found when I discovered that just one moderately challenging sudoku puzzle printed from this site or that site consumes almost my entire trip there or back.

Naturalamente, I became hooked.

In July I will find out which is stronger, my dependence on foreign oil or my dependence on foreign games of skill and logic. I'm not sure which I'm pulling for.