Before It All - July 2016
Part I - September 2022
Part II - October 2022
Part III - January 2023
Part IV - January 2023
Part V - April 2023
I met George in late 2008, and I was smitten. It took almost no time for such a crafty dark-eyed young woman as me to finagle my way into his living space. The fridge was fairly empty. The pantry of his kitchen was mostly filled with groceries belonging to his roommate, and he seemed to live off of Central Market trail mix with honey and milk. The shared living area in front of the TV was elevated by an attractive area rug that he vacuumed meticulously. His room was not particularly dirty, but I would hardly call it clean or organized. Thrown onto his desk amongst the other rubble was a three-dimensional Homer Simpson puzzle, carelessly scrambled and viscously chewed up by his very rude and disagreeable dog Bobbie. I took it home with me (yes, of course I went home that evening), assuming I'd be able to solve it with a fair-to-moderate amount of trouble - a feat that would allow me to woo him not only with my dark eyes, not only with my child-bearing hips, but also with some sort of trophy awarded to me for a particular brand of wits. Nonchalantly would I drop the puzzle back onto his desk, perhaps as soon as the very next day, most certainly solved, with hardly the hint of a smile on my lips as if it were nothing, and he would have no choice but to fall madly in love.
I must congratulate myself on this most excellent plan. Foolproof, one might say. So I cuddled up on the cold air mattress of my duplex in South Central Austin, where everything was clean and organized, and this foreign object on the verge of being reborn into a new life as a trophy was the first piece of rubble my room had ever seen. And with all the fervor of a young person in love, I proceeded down a long, hard road to nowhere. At times, my getting nowhere appeared as if I were getting somewhere, which filled the entire affair with even more desperation. For what if - as you can commiserate - what if my dark eyes and child-bearing hips weren't enough? Many of us women simply come this way; what's to distinguish us from one another?! After hours of determination and the inevitable despair that came along with it, I finally admitted defeat. I had failed. It was a shame, really, because I had really liked that one. The boyfriend, not the puzzle.
All had already been lost, so I researched Homer and discovered that he belonged to the Rubik's family. Of course I had never solved a Rubik's cube in my life, or I would have sensed the very nature of that deformed, chewed-up, jaundiced piece of plastic a hundred miles away. I looked up a solution, which means I cheated, got the thing restored to its original state, and fell asleep.
But it turns out the hips were enough.
We were married the next year, and then seven more passed. Looking back on that summer, Drakeson was full of life at age three, doing little jigsaws, his favorite of which had monsters. Milli was all of 8 months old, gnawing on her own little wooden puzzle pieces. And so, it seemed, the time had finally come.
I learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube (3x3x3), the Pocket Cube (2x2x2 - that's what Homer was), and the Professor's Cube (5x5x5). And with that, I got opinions. I rejected speedcubing before I began my research and I rejected the Rubik's Revenge (4x4x4) almost instantly. I taught my sister everything I knew, and together, we got opinions. We agreed that the Rubik's Revenge was worthy of rejection, and we considered the Professor's Cube and its reduction-related parity error irritating, but not a deal-breaker. I wrote a post on a discovery she made concerning the problem, and this was necessary because it elevated the Professor's Cube to an official status of worthwhileness.
For the Kratzke Sisters, that was decent closure for our new little pocket of wisdom. Gone were the days a Homer could stump me. But as for my grand plan of making George fall madly in love with me, due to my particular brand of wits, well, that fell very flat. I would call my new discoveries a half-redemption of my first failed trophy at best. George was not interested in the Professor's Cube or parity errors or anything I had to say really - he simply wanted to learn the bare minimum of what it would take to impress Don Williams. And with that, he had single-handedly turned my offering - the prize that had simmered in the background for eight years as I stood by his side, only to emerge radiant and glistening in the sunlight at last - into his own pathetic second-hand participation trophy, awarded to himself over a pissing match with a random unbeknownst coworker.
That was indubitably the end of it for six years. Drakeson and his friends grew into 9-year-olds. Unsurprisingly, one of the friends got into speedcubing, so his mom asked me to bake a Rubik's cube cake for his birthday, and oh, what a hot mess that was. I called my sister so that we could both laugh at my failures, for this is one of our favorite pastimes, and on a tangent, she asked me if I had ever written up a post on actually solving the cube. I hadn't, and at her request, I did. It was September of 2022; perhaps this was my year of glory at last. I wrote the entire post with the theme of one of George's very favorite shows, "The Year Without A Santa Claus." What could possibly have been more charming? More attractive? More irresistible? It was better than the rug in his apartment.
But what you, dear reader, and I have forgotten at this point in my story was that I had never been destined to earn such a trophy. In March of 2022, my parents had moved in with us, and that means that not one, not two, but three adults in my family, two of whom have advanced math degrees, told me that my post was totally worthless. Wrong at worst, nonsense at best, and obviously obnoxious. My good friend Jack, who edits math textbooks as part of his livelihood, touched up the grammar of the thing but refused to try to understand it. This is the opposite of a trophy - it is an embarrassment. That's okay. I responded to my fans with a sequel, which addressed the dreaded Rubik's Revenge and explored a more in-depth reasoning behind the first parity post I had written.
And that was the end, but I really meant it this time. I am a loving and romantic figure in the bottom of this paragraph, and there is only so much heartache a woman of my sensitivities can take.
However. After several months, it dawned on me that even if I couldn't teach adults, I could still teach my babies. After all, they're my babies. They'll do anything with me and anything for me, and they always understand me. The third post was nothing more than a documentation of our lessons together. Drakeson and Milli did great. You could say it's because they're kids, and kids are sponges, but the real reason is that they gave me a chance, and the adults didn't. Adults, generally speaking, know better than to take notes from dark-eyed witches with no trophies in their parlors.
But I digress - all of our classes got me thinking on my own, by accident, so I wrote a fourth post on the puzzles in my collection that never seemed adequately addressed in the first posts. There were only two puzzles, really, that had clearly materialized into my collection from the Land of Misfit Toys, and they were the Skewb and the Square One. So I explored those, and then finally, I was done. Four posts! Done, done, done, and done.
A few months later, George and I found ourselves together at The Coffee Shark while the kids were swimming. The cube came up. My readers can already see the tragedy that lies ahead, but I, a young witch of 40, was too lovestruck to abandon my dreams. There is no reason George can't know the things I know about the cube, and once I teach them to him, he will notice a particular brand of wits about me, and he will have no choice but to fall madly in love. And so I wrote yet another post - a new one - a final one - for my dearly beloved.
Had I reflected more thoroughly before embarking upon this endeavor, however, I would have realized what the absence of the trophy in the first place had really meant. It wasn't that I had enough charms to woo him without the trophy, oh, no. I mean, that was true, but that wasn't the lesson to be learned. No, the absence of the trophy was actually a stroke of luck for George. For had I presented a trophy, and had he failed to fall madly in love with me, I would have realized that it was I that was too good for him. It was I that needed to be impressed. It was I, who should have been sitting back in my throne, on my ample hips, peering through my dark and mercilessly judgmental eyes, at the trophies or lack thereof as they were presented. And only now has this lesson emerged, slowly like an elephant from the pages of the Magic Eye book. And George, the Duke of Rubble, refused to have anything to do with my post. I published it nearly a year ago, and my trophy that never was and never will be is not a phoenix. I will not write a sixth post, or at the very least, I will try my very best not to.
But there's no harm in a lady doing some reading.
Look at what I found today. A trophy!
Hello, Jamie. It appears that you have a particular brand of wits about you.
My name is Lan and I have dark eyes.
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