For my birthday, David commissioned a bunch of personalized puzzles I had to solve over the course of the birthday celebration. He provided a bunch of top-secret info about my life (aka, my mom told him a bunch of stories about my childhood) to our friends Jen McTeague and Ange Strom-Weber, the genius puzzle-makers at Apocute, who in turn, devised a trio of puzzles filled with clues about me. (Since there were 3 of ‘em, I guess they were about me, myself and I. And no, I’m not talking about the De La Soul song. Or the Beyoncé one. But both of those songs slap.) Here’s one of the puzzles: a crossword that kinda breaks all the rules of crosswords. (Eat my shorts, Will Shortz! I kid, I kid – you’re a genius, Mr. Shortz.) Instead of the words going down and across, they went down or zig-zagged across the grid. So it’s less of a crossword than a crisscrossword. Boom.

Here it is! Print it out, rock it out. Then, keep scrolling below for the solution.

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Answers below! Stop scrolling if you don’t wanna be spoiled!

DO keep scrolling if you’re ready to check your work…