If you’ve ever wondered how to play Candy Crush… These are the 11 steps I followed to reach Candy Crush Expert Candy Sorter Extraordinaire status. Whip out your smartphone and follow along:

1) The Candy Crush app mysteriously shows up on your phone. You delete it immediately. You give your husband some guff for succumbing to one too many Facebook game invites.

My husband and I share an iTunes login, and our phones are synced up with apps. So if I buy one, it shows up on his phone and vice versa. My email’s the one on the account, so I also always find out what music he’s downloading.

For his sake I’ll keep quiet about that. For now.

2) You see your son playing Candy Crush on his dad’s phone, and you’re blasted back to your Bejeweled days. You take a turn playing the game, and while he’s not looking play a couple of really quick extra turns.

You’re kind of sad when it’s time to give the phone back to your 4 year old for his turn.

3) You download Candy Crush again from the App store. Just for fun quick little breaks, you tell yourself. You don’t need to take everything so seriously all the time, you tell yourself. You play one life and quit the app when you die.

4) You start playing Candy Crush at night when the kids go to bed. The huzz works at night, the kids go to bed around 8. You get comfy in pajamas, pop Gilmore Girls on, and sort candy quietly on the couch. When you blast through your five lives, you’re kind of sad. You finish out the rest of the night watching Gilmore Girls. Giving it your full attention you notice that some of the delivery, while very well written and funny, comes across as a little wooden from time to time.

5) You download the other Candy Crush game, Candy Crush Soda. Now you play all five lives from Candy Crush, and when you’re out of lives there you click over to Candy Crush Soda and run through five lives there. You start harassing random Candy Crush players for extra lives, but you promise yourself you will never ever link up your game to Facebook and annoy your real life friends with game requests.

6) You scoff at your husband for giving the game any money. When you get the iTunes receipt in your email saying the huzz gave Candy Crush a dollar, you jokingly ask him if you’re going to need to start working Candy Crush gold bars into the monthly budget.

7) You give Candy Crush money. I mean come on, once you hit level 30 or so you need gold bars to advance to the next episode, and when you were a newbie just learning how to play Candy Crush you wasted all yours on stupid boosters and finishing out levels instead of trying again.

8) You start to resent that you have to wait for more lives to show up when you’ve played all five lives on both games. You google how to get more lives immediately. You learn that you can game the system by changing the time on your phone. You start playing Candy Crush and Candy Crush Soda when the kids go to bed, and continue until you fall asleep on the couch or until your phone battery dies, whichever comes first. Sometimes you forget to change the time on your phone back to real time, leaving you disoriented. Like a crack fiend.

9) You start trying to become a better Candy Crush player. You start paying close attention to patterns in the game, trying to decipher which moves cause certain events. You discover that the direction of the stripes on striped candy dictates which way the explosion happens across the entire line of candy. You also discover you can dictate the direction of the stripes on the candy – if you swipe sideways to create one, the stripes are horizontal. If you swipe vertical, the stripes will be vertical. You start to wonder if you’re looking at the code of The Matrix as you deftly sort colorful candy pieces late into the night.

10) You start to feel really weird about Candy Crush. You think about how you started playing it just before Christmas, and it kind of took over really fast, like that riot scene in Hot Rod. You’ve been sneaking into Candy Crush in the daytime hours. You start to worry that you’re sending the wrong message to your kids. You start to feel a little weird that Candy Crush is something you do while you’re watching tv at the end of the day, even when other people are around. You remember that you’re really into unplugging, and that you haven’t been. You realize that you have pretty ambitious goals for your art and design business, and none of those will happen if you’re spending 2 hours sorting virtual candy at the end of the day instead of drawing or reading or actual unwinding watching a little mindless TV.

11) You delete Candy Crush and Candy Crush Soda from your phone. That night when the kids go to bed, you get back on the computer and work on editing your website for 2 hours. You still stared at a screen instead of completely unplugging, but you accomplished something real for your business. You felt a focus that you hadn’t had in a while. And it felt pretty good.

So I guess it wasn’t all bad.