Navigation

Miss Anything?

To Infinity and Beyond - September 01, 2006
Today's Post - August 26, 2006
Is This Thing On? - August 24, 2006
Finally, Forfeit! - November 06, 2005
So Here's How it Happened... - November 02, 2005

Contact

Highlights

Cream of the Crop

Credits

October 23, 2003

Sine of the Devil

I really wish I'd had this diary around the same time last year, just because I had so many things going on at the same time. Life was just a lot more interesting, and I guess I would've filled up a hundred entries based on my first impressions of both Ugly Alison and Patrick. The first quarter of last year was particularly interesting; as I had to get used to sleeping in a crowded room with four other girls, disgruntled professors who had terrible sinuses, the drunken brawls outside of our bedroom suite, and a certain calculus TA by the name of Adam.

Adam was weird. Not just in the strange, "Ha ha, that's funny" kind of weird. We're talking weird-weird. Almost "Friday the 13th" kind of weird. Every Tuesday and Thursday in recitation, I would sit in the back of the room and wonder if he could ever get any stranger. You see, Adam had this weird tendency to stick the number 666 into just about every problem we ever did in his class. At first, it was just kind of funny, but then as the quarter went on, you started wondering if you weren't going to end up being sent to purgatory at the end of the final exam. All of the assignments had problems that were solved with the answer 666, or maybe even something like sin(666)+cos(666). It was predictable, but odd.

Really odd.

One week, we had a quiz that was worded something like this:

Lucy Furr owns a mortuary on West 666th Avenue. Her friend, B.L. Zebub, wants to know the cost of constructing a coffin to fit his recently deceased sister. Because of their friendship, Lucy Furr is willing to cut some costs for B.L. Zebub here and there, but isn't sure just where to start. Determine the most cost-effective dimensions for the coffin, and give Lucy the estimates.

And then there was another one like this:

I have just contracted a new disease that is eating the flesh from my body at a rapid pace. If I weigh 666 pounds today, and lose 6 inches of body mass every six days, just how long will it take me to die completely?*

Of course the answers were always 666. You couldn't get away from it. The dimensions to Lucy's coffin were 6x6x6, with a price tag of $666. And according to the second problem, it would take 666 days for a ridiculously overweight human being to be consumed by a rancid, flesh-eating disease. Adam was a sick man, I tell you. A very sick man. Whenever you'd ask him about his choice of numbers, he'd flash this vampire grin at you and say, "Why not? I think it's a perfectly good number to use," and then go back to scribbling away more examples on the chalkboard.

Maybe it's just me, but there's got to be something wrong with a person who thinks up things like that. You could tell he got a kick out of watching our reactions to the problems desrcibed in the quizzes, and he criticized our professor for not being as "creative" with the problems he assigned. I dunno what was up with all of that... But I kept feeling as though I had these little pitchforks prick along my shoulder as I sat in class throughout the year. I still get the same feeling whenever I pick up a calculator. Math is a very shaming subject.

*Don't hold me to any of the math up there. I can hardly count past twenty without getting confused.

posted at 4:08 p.m.

backward forward