- #36
FlexGunship
Gold Member
- 426
- 8
Nikitin said:
Cosine ruined my life. When I was in high school, a friend introduced me to cosine. Until that point, all I knew was sine. Sometimes I would solve a tangent at a party, but only if I knew I had a ride home. Cosine was especially troublesome for me... it looked so much like sine that my family and friends never knew the difference.
Once I hit college, and I had a lot of freedom, I started investing more time in cosine. It started harmlessly enough by cutting into my social time, but slowly I became a recluse. Then my school work faltered and I was put on academic probation. I joined a support group during that time, but it only introduced me to more people with the same addiction. We would sit there in meetings and fantasize about cosine in polar coordinates or solving it in higher dimensions. Me and two other guys dropped out of the support group and would spend every night on Wolfram Alpha graphing cosine function after cosine function.
I didn't answer phone calls from family or friends, and I was quickly kicked out of school. I lived on the street for a few months that summer, too ashamed to confront my family. I would scrounge for scraps of pizza in the garbage and would draw the cosine function with the sauce. I lived like that with $cos(π/2) in my pocket.
Finally, I dragged myself back to my family when drawing cos(x) in the sand at elementary school parks landed me in jail several times. They were so happy to see me, but that feeling quickly faded when my addiction started to affect them too. I started drawing cosine on the bathroom mirror in soap which forced my family to experience it when they got out of the shower. They tolerated until my 15 year old brother (who we all suspected partook of sine with his skater friends) got caught at school adding (π/2) to his sine argument in the parking lot during study hall.
I knew I had gone too far. But so did my parents.
They kicked me out of the house and I checked into a mental hospital. With the help of professionals and some hyperbolic trig functions I was able to ween myself off of cosine after about a year, but my family still won't talk to me. It's been four years since I've talked to my parents.
All because of cosine.
Do I hate it? Yes. And it made me hate myself.
