All right. I admit it. At last I’m doing what the cool kids do. I’m playing Wordle daily.

I resisted for as long as I could. I even wrote a blog post about how I was not going to succumb. I found it annoying when every day I saw people posting on Facebook what their scores were. That trend seems to have stopped, or at least pulled back. Now, most people only share their results when they get the word in two or three guesses.

My first brush with Wordle came when I was visiting friends in Michigan. Leslie was playing Wordle while someone else drove. She was having a hard time with one particular word and was down to her last try. I looked over her shoulder at the puzzle and said, “Prism.”

“That could work.”

It did.

“You’re good at this. You should be playing it.”

But I resisted. I’ve long been a fan of crossword puzzles and anacrostics. I’ve also done a lot of sudoku and right now I’m obsessed with jigsaw sudoku. (This is an insidious form of the puzzle in which, instead of neat little square blocks, each area is some other shape. A “U” or a snake or some unidentifiable blob. The rules are the same. Each shape contains nine little squares, which must contain the numbers from one to nine. Each row and column must also contain one through nine. But I digress.) (My husband’s famous quote regarding sudoku is, “I may not be able to spell, but goddamit, I can count to nine!” But I digress some more.)

Then one day, one of my writing buddies, Mary Jo, sang the praises of Wordle. “You should try it,” she said. “It takes less than five minutes a day.” (Jigsaw sudoku takes longer than that.)

So, okay. If Mary Jo recommended it, I decided I would try it. I’ve played it every day since, so it’s all her fault.

I have my routine. My first and second words are always the same. They give me all the vowels (including Y) and at least three of the most common consonants. I’ve solved it in three tries more times than six, but four is my usual. I’ve learned to hate words that have several possible choices for the missing letter, like STEA—it could be STEAM, STEAK, STEAD, or STEAL, and if I run out of guesses, I’m screwed. Then there was the time the word was PENNE. Two double letters. Only one letter was revealed by my first two guesses. But I got it!

When I reached a streak of 30 consecutive completions, I told Mary Jo. She admitted, faux-modestly, that her record was 390 days. (I’m sure it’s even more by now.)

Then I found out her secret: She cheats.

(Okay, technically, I guess you can’t call it cheating. She has Wordle buddies that consult with her daily and give each other hints. (I’m not one of them, [sob!].) She refers to the complete list of words that have been Wordle solutions, so that she won’t get hung up on STEA if STEAM has already been used. I didn’t even know the list existed until recently. But I digress again.)

I won’t say I’m addicted to Wordle, but if I’m up after midnight, I do go directly to the Wordle page on the NYT site and try my brain. I tell my husband my score daily. (I don’t do so well on Spelling Bee. Sometimes I can guess at least one word just by looking at it. Other times, I simply can’t, no matter how long I study it. So I don’t. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, I now expect my friends to laugh and point (insofar as you can point online). Especially Mary Jo.