This post, I suspect, is going to quickly turn into a self-congratulatory paean to the crossword community, but so be it. It's on my first ACPT experience, and my first ACPT experience was overwhelmingly positive, so that's going to be the tone the post. Anything less than "Wow... that was awesome!" would be disingenuous.
Also, this post is kinda long -- it's a kinda long self-congratulatory paean.
But I shall begin with one part of tournament that stressed me out a bit: I didn't know where to go or what to do once I got there. Since one of my puzzles was to appear in the tournament, I couldn't attend as a solver, so I (happily) agreed to be a tournament official, but I didn't really know what that meant. Some new crossword (and trivia) acquaintances, Brian Cross and Michael Berman, were gracious enough to let me ride up with them (from the DC-area), and at one point they asked me what time I needed to be there, and I was like, "Uhhh... five-o-clock?... maybe?" I was told in an email that there would be a dinner for officials at that time, but I was never given a place. When I inquired further, I was told it was "in flux," and I would get an announcement. I did not get an announcement. I figured that once I got there everything would make sense and it would all be easy to figure out (which it was), but even though I could figure that, I couldn't feel that. I'm not laid back when it comes to making travel plans -- not at all. I'm fine once everything is "set," but until then I anxiously obsess over every accommodation and every decision. So, it bothered me to not have a definite time and place to meet. (By the way, a good remedy for this condition is to marry somebody who's the exact opposite, even if it does mean your spouse will likely laugh at you for it. Initially, I was going to take the train up, and my wife was getting a kick out of how long I deliberated over three tickets that were virtually identical -- "Just buy a ticket already! It's not that hard!")
Thankfully, once I got to the hotel, the first person I met was Tracy Gray, who in addition to being an excellent constructor, is now one of the nicest people I know. She got me all set up and showed me the ropes and introduced me to a bunch of the other officials -- many of whom, like Tracy, were constructors whose puzzles I always enjoy.
I didn't have any official duties on Friday, and I had some time to kill before dinner, so I just wandered around the hotel lobby for a while. I'm not great at approaching people I don't know. Once the introduction is done, I'm totally comfortable conversing with pretty much anybody, but I'm always apprehensive about initiating a meeting. It's not a shyness thing, and it's not a self-confidence thing. It's something else. I always just assume people don't want to be bothered. It's not rational -- especially in the context of a hotel lobby for a big event; anybody who doesn't want to be bothered can go to their room -- but a lot of how we interact with people isn't rational. To overcome this, I decided to force myself to make an introduction or say "hi" to everybody whose name I recognized -- which was pretty much everybody in the lobby, being that it was full of crossword puzzle people, and I do crossword puzzles everyday, and then I read all the blogs about them.
It went pretty well, though. The thing you always hear about crossword puzzle tournaments is "everybody is SO nice," and it really is true. One of the first people I came across was Laura Braunstein, somebody I knew from Twitter/blogs, who turned out to be delightful in person. I also said "hey" to Erik Agard, which I mention strictly to name-drop, since he is now the champion (and then some!). The thing about introducing yourself to people in a setting like this is that it makes things significantly less awkward because otherwise you just see them around, and they know who you are and you know who they are, and it's like -- do we just talk to each other like we've met before, even though we haven't? I inadvertently did this with some people this weekend. At least twice, I struck up a conversation with somebody as if we had met before, and then they told me that we hadn't -- we had only ever had interactions online. Confusing real-life with the internet -- and I'm a relatively young man -- this doesn't portend well for the future
The officiating went swimmingly from my end. My responsibilities were easy, if tedious -- mostly marking wrong squares with a highlighter. But the thing about tedious jobs is that you quickly bond with your coworkers because there is nothing else to do but chat with them. Everybody was tremendous. I feel compelled to give a shout-out to everybody I worked with, but then this entire post would just be a long list of names. One person I will acknowledge, though, is Mike Nothnagel, who was effectively our team captain. He's a really cool guy. Also, a very good constructor. I always love seeing his byline on NYT themeless puzzles, but he hasn't published there in several years.
Oh, also, I'll mention that I liked meeting Stanley Newman -- an old-school puzzler. He's a funny guy. He reminded me of a quirky neighbor from a '70s sitcom. The judges dinners were buffet-style, and at the first one, several of us got there a bit early, so we were waiting around for others to arrive before we just start serving ourselves (also it was only 4:50 pm; I wasn't even hungry yet). And Stanley comes in and says, "Ahh... the food's here! Good!" and promptly digs in. Well, it broke the ice; everybody followed suit.
Despite being quite tired, I spent Friday night at the hotel bar because I wanted to meet people -- and I succeeded. I think I met half of Crossworld, and the other half I met Saturday night. It's a pretty impressive bunch. As I posted on Twitter, at one point I was talking to three people: The first one was a five-time Jeopardy! champ (Joon Pahk), the second was a nine-time Jeopardy! champ (Jason Keller), and the third won over $2 million on a trivia game show I had never heard of hosted by Ryan Seacrest (Andy Kravis). Also, I hung out with Dan Felsenheld, who won twice on Jeopardy!, bringing my Jeopardy!-acquaintance-win total to 16 -- not bad for a single weekend. I didn't realize until this tournament, how much the crossword community overlaps with the trivia community. It make sense -- I just didn't realize it. [Update: see comment section below. I might be undercounting the Jeopardy! totals.]
I met Brendan Emmett Quigley, which was cool, because he was the first published constructor I knew of who's my age (approximately, I think he's a few years older than me). I remember reading a profile of him sometime in the late '90s or early '00s -- when I was just making puzzles for my parents and whichever friends would humor me -- and being super jealous. I remember thinking: What?! He's published, like, 30 puzzles in the New York Times?! How does one even do that?! The concept of actually submitting my puzzles for publication took me a surprisingly long time to realize. I always figured an editor would notice me constructing in a coffee shop, peer over my shoulder, recognize the brilliance of my work, and offer me a contract on the spot -- a particularly fantastical hope being that I only ever made puzzles late at night alone in my room.
Also, a tidbit Brendan told me is that he doesn't like going by three names -- he just got locked into it when he was younger, and now it's too late to turn back. It's funny how things like this become things. When I first started publishing puzzles I used my middle initial "Damon J. Gulczynski" -- I don't even remember why. I thought it was because Crossword Compiler had a field for author middle initial, and I just filled it in, but looking at it now, it doesn't, so I'm not sure how it started. At some point, somebody said that middle initials are pretentious, and it made me self-conscious about using one, so I stopped. I didn't think much of it, but after my next published puzzle, several people commented about it online. Also, Jules Markey told me this weekend that he stopped using a middle initial after I did because he (like me) has a distinctive enough name without one. Personally, I think Brendan should just drop the middle name if he wants to. It'd be like when John Mellencamp dropped the Cougar. Although, BEQ is a cool initialism.
Anyway... Friday night I had an awful time trying to sleep. It was a bad combination of an uncomfortable bed (it didn't meet my springiness standards; it was a glorified foam pad), missing my "fall-asleep window," and being anxious for the next day. And then I started feeling anxious because I couldn't sleep, which only made it harder to sleep, which only made me more anxious... I think everybody is familiar with that cycle of despair -- when you glance at the clock and think, "Okay, if I fall asleep right now..." but you can't fall asleep right now, which is the entire problem!
Another thing with me is I get awful cottonmouth when I drink, even just a few drinks, so I pound a bunch of water, and then I have to get up and go to the bathroom all night. It's irritating when it's just me, and it's absolutely awful when I'm rooming with noted crossword puzzle editor Mike Shenk. (By the way, I was rooming with noted crossword puzzle editor Mike Shenk.) I did eventually fall asleep, around 5:30 am, which got me a good three hours -- not ideal but enough to function with the right mix of caffeine and adrenaline. And when I asked Mike in the morning, he said he didn't even notice me stirring, so either I didn't bother him, or he had the decency to lie to me. I'll take it either way.
After working the first session Saturday as a scorer, I got to be a referee in the ballroom the second session, since my puzzle was one of the ones solved. It was cool. I got introduced by Will and received a round of applause. I snapped the selfie below between puzzles. I appear much balder in it than I would prefer, but as my wife said, "That's just how you look now." So it is.
My puzzle engendered a bit of controversy, as some solvers -- a nontrivial minority -- did something I never anticipated. At first, I felt steadfastly that what they did was wrong, but after hearing some of them plead their cases, I understood the argument. (Will's the decider, and I believe he ruled it was indeed wrong, but he adjudicated in favor of the solver in some specific cases.) Whatever the case, I don't believe it ended up affecting the relative rankings of the top finishers in any division, which is good. Overall, the feedback I received from my puzzle was overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people went out of their way to tell me they liked it, which I really appreciated. I heard a few snippy comments about it as well, but that's fine with me. I like it actually. It makes things more interesting if there are a few naysayers in the bunch. I mean, if people are critical of your work, at least it shows you did something worth critiquing. I'd rather have that than total apathy toward one of my puzzles.
Saturday there was another unsettling aspect to the tournament: Reports on Twitter by some women about creepy dude behavior. One said some guy read her an unsolicited, suggestive poem he wrote (how very Garrison Keillor of him); another said she got egregiously boob-ogled. This surprises me exactly 0%, and if it surprises you, you haven't been paying attention for the last... ever. My life thus far has been something of a natural experiment in dude culture. I've spent a lot of time with just about every type of dude -- liberal, conservative, jock, nerd, preppy, hipster, punk-rock, skater, frat boy, gay, straight, bi, black, white, brown, "nice" guy, d-bag, so on and so on -- and one through-line of these groups is that there are creeps in all of them. It's not literally all men, but it's all types of men. No matter what dude phylum you belong to, there are guys in it who feel entitled to make women feel uncomfortable for their own gratification. So, men, don't get all sanctimoniously bent out of shape when we get called out on it -- and if you're an offender, knock it the fuck off!
And women, keep calling us out. It works. Nobody wants their name floated in the whisper network. For my part, I don't think I act creepily -- at least I've never heard that from anybody -- but I've become more cognizant of how I conduct myself and what I say in certain situations. For example, I love low-brow humor (think Jackass), so among friends I might make silly, "inappropriate" jokes. In my younger days, I might even make them among people who aren't really my friends yet. Now, I try not to do that. The upside of this is that I'm much less likely to offend somebody or make them feel uncomfortable; the downside is that I deprive my company of a "brilliant" joke -- i.e., there really is no downside. I'm not that funny, anyway. (On a related note, is there any guy more hilariously pathetic than the take-my-ball-and-go-home guy -- Well, if women are going to get all "me too" on everybody, I guess I'm just never going to talk to a woman ever again -- to which women are surely responding, "yeah, okay, that sounds fine to us.")
Anyway... I slept fine Saturday night, if you were wondering.
The grading went quite fast on Sunday, as there was only one puzzle left. Because I didn't compete, I didn't have a strong investment in the horse race aspect of the tournament, so I wasn't following the standings too closely, and so the biggest story of the weekend -- Erik Agard's astonishing performance -- slid under my radar until the very last puzzle. I didn't realize how good he actually was until he crushed the finale several minutes faster than Dan Feyer (you know, Dan Feyer, the seven-time champion!). It's difficult to overstate how impressive it was to watch in person. And it makes me wonder -- is this just the new normal now? Is Erik just that much faster than the field? It's going to be fun to find out.
For my part, I have more modest solving goals, I would like to finish in the top half of the JV division of the Indie 500 with a clean slate of puzzles. If I can do that, then I will be content. I fancy myself much more of a constructor than a solver anyway. Speaking of which, I have one appearing in the New York Times in the near future -- keep an eye out for it. Until then...
Also, this post is kinda long -- it's a kinda long self-congratulatory paean.
But I shall begin with one part of tournament that stressed me out a bit: I didn't know where to go or what to do once I got there. Since one of my puzzles was to appear in the tournament, I couldn't attend as a solver, so I (happily) agreed to be a tournament official, but I didn't really know what that meant. Some new crossword (and trivia) acquaintances, Brian Cross and Michael Berman, were gracious enough to let me ride up with them (from the DC-area), and at one point they asked me what time I needed to be there, and I was like, "Uhhh... five-o-clock?... maybe?" I was told in an email that there would be a dinner for officials at that time, but I was never given a place. When I inquired further, I was told it was "in flux," and I would get an announcement. I did not get an announcement. I figured that once I got there everything would make sense and it would all be easy to figure out (which it was), but even though I could figure that, I couldn't feel that. I'm not laid back when it comes to making travel plans -- not at all. I'm fine once everything is "set," but until then I anxiously obsess over every accommodation and every decision. So, it bothered me to not have a definite time and place to meet. (By the way, a good remedy for this condition is to marry somebody who's the exact opposite, even if it does mean your spouse will likely laugh at you for it. Initially, I was going to take the train up, and my wife was getting a kick out of how long I deliberated over three tickets that were virtually identical -- "Just buy a ticket already! It's not that hard!")
Thankfully, once I got to the hotel, the first person I met was Tracy Gray, who in addition to being an excellent constructor, is now one of the nicest people I know. She got me all set up and showed me the ropes and introduced me to a bunch of the other officials -- many of whom, like Tracy, were constructors whose puzzles I always enjoy.
I didn't have any official duties on Friday, and I had some time to kill before dinner, so I just wandered around the hotel lobby for a while. I'm not great at approaching people I don't know. Once the introduction is done, I'm totally comfortable conversing with pretty much anybody, but I'm always apprehensive about initiating a meeting. It's not a shyness thing, and it's not a self-confidence thing. It's something else. I always just assume people don't want to be bothered. It's not rational -- especially in the context of a hotel lobby for a big event; anybody who doesn't want to be bothered can go to their room -- but a lot of how we interact with people isn't rational. To overcome this, I decided to force myself to make an introduction or say "hi" to everybody whose name I recognized -- which was pretty much everybody in the lobby, being that it was full of crossword puzzle people, and I do crossword puzzles everyday, and then I read all the blogs about them.
It went pretty well, though. The thing you always hear about crossword puzzle tournaments is "everybody is SO nice," and it really is true. One of the first people I came across was Laura Braunstein, somebody I knew from Twitter/blogs, who turned out to be delightful in person. I also said "hey" to Erik Agard, which I mention strictly to name-drop, since he is now the champion (and then some!). The thing about introducing yourself to people in a setting like this is that it makes things significantly less awkward because otherwise you just see them around, and they know who you are and you know who they are, and it's like -- do we just talk to each other like we've met before, even though we haven't? I inadvertently did this with some people this weekend. At least twice, I struck up a conversation with somebody as if we had met before, and then they told me that we hadn't -- we had only ever had interactions online. Confusing real-life with the internet -- and I'm a relatively young man -- this doesn't portend well for the future
The officiating went swimmingly from my end. My responsibilities were easy, if tedious -- mostly marking wrong squares with a highlighter. But the thing about tedious jobs is that you quickly bond with your coworkers because there is nothing else to do but chat with them. Everybody was tremendous. I feel compelled to give a shout-out to everybody I worked with, but then this entire post would just be a long list of names. One person I will acknowledge, though, is Mike Nothnagel, who was effectively our team captain. He's a really cool guy. Also, a very good constructor. I always love seeing his byline on NYT themeless puzzles, but he hasn't published there in several years.
Oh, also, I'll mention that I liked meeting Stanley Newman -- an old-school puzzler. He's a funny guy. He reminded me of a quirky neighbor from a '70s sitcom. The judges dinners were buffet-style, and at the first one, several of us got there a bit early, so we were waiting around for others to arrive before we just start serving ourselves (also it was only 4:50 pm; I wasn't even hungry yet). And Stanley comes in and says, "Ahh... the food's here! Good!" and promptly digs in. Well, it broke the ice; everybody followed suit.
Despite being quite tired, I spent Friday night at the hotel bar because I wanted to meet people -- and I succeeded. I think I met half of Crossworld, and the other half I met Saturday night. It's a pretty impressive bunch. As I posted on Twitter, at one point I was talking to three people: The first one was a five-time Jeopardy! champ (Joon Pahk), the second was a nine-time Jeopardy! champ (Jason Keller), and the third won over $2 million on a trivia game show I had never heard of hosted by Ryan Seacrest (Andy Kravis). Also, I hung out with Dan Felsenheld, who won twice on Jeopardy!, bringing my Jeopardy!-acquaintance-win total to 16 -- not bad for a single weekend. I didn't realize until this tournament, how much the crossword community overlaps with the trivia community. It make sense -- I just didn't realize it. [Update: see comment section below. I might be undercounting the Jeopardy! totals.]
I met Brendan Emmett Quigley, which was cool, because he was the first published constructor I knew of who's my age (approximately, I think he's a few years older than me). I remember reading a profile of him sometime in the late '90s or early '00s -- when I was just making puzzles for my parents and whichever friends would humor me -- and being super jealous. I remember thinking: What?! He's published, like, 30 puzzles in the New York Times?! How does one even do that?! The concept of actually submitting my puzzles for publication took me a surprisingly long time to realize. I always figured an editor would notice me constructing in a coffee shop, peer over my shoulder, recognize the brilliance of my work, and offer me a contract on the spot -- a particularly fantastical hope being that I only ever made puzzles late at night alone in my room.
Also, a tidbit Brendan told me is that he doesn't like going by three names -- he just got locked into it when he was younger, and now it's too late to turn back. It's funny how things like this become things. When I first started publishing puzzles I used my middle initial "Damon J. Gulczynski" -- I don't even remember why. I thought it was because Crossword Compiler had a field for author middle initial, and I just filled it in, but looking at it now, it doesn't, so I'm not sure how it started. At some point, somebody said that middle initials are pretentious, and it made me self-conscious about using one, so I stopped. I didn't think much of it, but after my next published puzzle, several people commented about it online. Also, Jules Markey told me this weekend that he stopped using a middle initial after I did because he (like me) has a distinctive enough name without one. Personally, I think Brendan should just drop the middle name if he wants to. It'd be like when John Mellencamp dropped the Cougar. Although, BEQ is a cool initialism.
Anyway... Friday night I had an awful time trying to sleep. It was a bad combination of an uncomfortable bed (it didn't meet my springiness standards; it was a glorified foam pad), missing my "fall-asleep window," and being anxious for the next day. And then I started feeling anxious because I couldn't sleep, which only made it harder to sleep, which only made me more anxious... I think everybody is familiar with that cycle of despair -- when you glance at the clock and think, "Okay, if I fall asleep right now..." but you can't fall asleep right now, which is the entire problem!
Another thing with me is I get awful cottonmouth when I drink, even just a few drinks, so I pound a bunch of water, and then I have to get up and go to the bathroom all night. It's irritating when it's just me, and it's absolutely awful when I'm rooming with noted crossword puzzle editor Mike Shenk. (By the way, I was rooming with noted crossword puzzle editor Mike Shenk.) I did eventually fall asleep, around 5:30 am, which got me a good three hours -- not ideal but enough to function with the right mix of caffeine and adrenaline. And when I asked Mike in the morning, he said he didn't even notice me stirring, so either I didn't bother him, or he had the decency to lie to me. I'll take it either way.
After working the first session Saturday as a scorer, I got to be a referee in the ballroom the second session, since my puzzle was one of the ones solved. It was cool. I got introduced by Will and received a round of applause. I snapped the selfie below between puzzles. I appear much balder in it than I would prefer, but as my wife said, "That's just how you look now." So it is.
My puzzle engendered a bit of controversy, as some solvers -- a nontrivial minority -- did something I never anticipated. At first, I felt steadfastly that what they did was wrong, but after hearing some of them plead their cases, I understood the argument. (Will's the decider, and I believe he ruled it was indeed wrong, but he adjudicated in favor of the solver in some specific cases.) Whatever the case, I don't believe it ended up affecting the relative rankings of the top finishers in any division, which is good. Overall, the feedback I received from my puzzle was overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people went out of their way to tell me they liked it, which I really appreciated. I heard a few snippy comments about it as well, but that's fine with me. I like it actually. It makes things more interesting if there are a few naysayers in the bunch. I mean, if people are critical of your work, at least it shows you did something worth critiquing. I'd rather have that than total apathy toward one of my puzzles.
Saturday there was another unsettling aspect to the tournament: Reports on Twitter by some women about creepy dude behavior. One said some guy read her an unsolicited, suggestive poem he wrote (how very Garrison Keillor of him); another said she got egregiously boob-ogled. This surprises me exactly 0%, and if it surprises you, you haven't been paying attention for the last... ever. My life thus far has been something of a natural experiment in dude culture. I've spent a lot of time with just about every type of dude -- liberal, conservative, jock, nerd, preppy, hipster, punk-rock, skater, frat boy, gay, straight, bi, black, white, brown, "nice" guy, d-bag, so on and so on -- and one through-line of these groups is that there are creeps in all of them. It's not literally all men, but it's all types of men. No matter what dude phylum you belong to, there are guys in it who feel entitled to make women feel uncomfortable for their own gratification. So, men, don't get all sanctimoniously bent out of shape when we get called out on it -- and if you're an offender, knock it the fuck off!
And women, keep calling us out. It works. Nobody wants their name floated in the whisper network. For my part, I don't think I act creepily -- at least I've never heard that from anybody -- but I've become more cognizant of how I conduct myself and what I say in certain situations. For example, I love low-brow humor (think Jackass), so among friends I might make silly, "inappropriate" jokes. In my younger days, I might even make them among people who aren't really my friends yet. Now, I try not to do that. The upside of this is that I'm much less likely to offend somebody or make them feel uncomfortable; the downside is that I deprive my company of a "brilliant" joke -- i.e., there really is no downside. I'm not that funny, anyway. (On a related note, is there any guy more hilariously pathetic than the take-my-ball-and-go-home guy -- Well, if women are going to get all "me too" on everybody, I guess I'm just never going to talk to a woman ever again -- to which women are surely responding, "yeah, okay, that sounds fine to us.")
Anyway... I slept fine Saturday night, if you were wondering.
The grading went quite fast on Sunday, as there was only one puzzle left. Because I didn't compete, I didn't have a strong investment in the horse race aspect of the tournament, so I wasn't following the standings too closely, and so the biggest story of the weekend -- Erik Agard's astonishing performance -- slid under my radar until the very last puzzle. I didn't realize how good he actually was until he crushed the finale several minutes faster than Dan Feyer (you know, Dan Feyer, the seven-time champion!). It's difficult to overstate how impressive it was to watch in person. And it makes me wonder -- is this just the new normal now? Is Erik just that much faster than the field? It's going to be fun to find out.
For my part, I have more modest solving goals, I would like to finish in the top half of the JV division of the Indie 500 with a clean slate of puzzles. If I can do that, then I will be content. I fancy myself much more of a constructor than a solver anyway. Speaking of which, I have one appearing in the New York Times in the near future -- keep an eye out for it. Until then...
