This morning The Talker called me. I was enjoying a little bit of sleep-time, so I just let it ring, and then listened to him as he left his message, vaguely catching that he wanted to talk to me, and that he seemed worried, or maybe a little angry.

When I fell back asleep I had a dream, in which I saw him from a shadowy grey distance. Super-imposed over this image was the understanding that our "relationship" was just like the mathmatical function f(x) = tan (sin x) *. The reason for this is because sin x will never give the value of more than 1, or less than-1. Taken as the imput for tan x, this creates a graph that just goes a little bit above the x-axis, then drops down to just below the x-axis, over and over again, world without end, amen. That's just like how it is with me and The Talker; nothing ever really gets that good, and nothing ever really gets that bad; but no matter how good it is, I know it's going to get bad again later, and vice versa.

Actually, what this dream says about my interactions with The Talker is less interesting to me than the fact that I could come up with a mathmatical analogy in my sleep; especailly ones involving trig functions, which I never seem to quite understand at more than a superficial level.

* note: if you want to graph this function on a graphing calculator in order to better picture this analogy, the most important thing is to make sure you're doing it in DEGREES not radians. Thank you to The Dolphin for calling my attention to this important distinction. Also, you would be well advised to set your viewing window to see very large x-values, and pretty small y-values (the interval [-1,1] should work well).