Emily Code: Practice Makes Me Think Outside the Box

October 20, 2015

Remember Emily? She’s our Senior Operations Associate and resident show tune aficionado. She’s also the next MM team member to offer up her daily “practice.” Read her story below, and check out the full #PracticeMakes series here.

“Practice makes me think outside the box.”

I have always been a “puzzle person.” Whether screaming at the TV during an episode of Jeopardy! or alienating friends during board games, I’ve always had a passion for activities where random knowledge intersects with competition. For three years, I even hosted weekly bar trivia throughout NYC—a job I look back on with great fondness. But on a daily basis, my most enjoyable, challenging practice is completing crossword puzzles.

Crosswords are the intersection of creative thinking and definitive right answers, and given that I spent most of my life before MM in the theater, my obsession with crosswords began as a balance to the intangibility of artistic success. The competition was always against myself—to beat my best time, to train my brain to process the multiple meanings of any given clue. The more crosswords I do, the more I learn about how they are constructed and about clue-writers’ “tricks.” I’m always building up random knowledge from clues I see oft repeated; for example, I know nothing about hockey, but a hockey clue with a three-box answer is almost always ORR, in reference to hockey player Bobby Orr, and a question about robes or geishas with a three-box answer is frequently OBI, the name of a kimono’s sash.

I do about five crosswords a day at the moment, and I’m satisfied if I can finish a New York Times Monday puzzle in eight minutes. At my peak, I was doing up to 15 puzzles a day and my best time for a NYT Monday puzzle was five minutes and 50 seconds—not a record-breaker by any stretch, but a stat I boast about whenever vaguely applicable.

Check out the #PracticeMakes collection, and read about its creation here.