Note to anybody who gets their books from the Elmvale Acres branch of the Ottawa Public Library: There’s a really cute, really clumsy book stacker who’s always there from 4:00 to 5:00 on Saturdays.

Don’t ask me how I know this.

I just paid a deposit on a $1900.00 tailor-made suit/tux.

To be fair, that price includes two shirts. And I’m assuming the fabric is made of the tiny chin hairs of near-extinct goats of some remote African village.

More on this later. Assuming I don’t go hang myself in shame.

Edit: Hey, I just realized. Is this how I’d feel if I had to buy a wedding dress? I mean, how many times does someone actually use a wedding gown? Once? Twice? That’s a grand (or two) straight down the drain, eh?

Later Edit: I can’t believe I just imagined myself buying a wedding gown. Shit.

It was a dark and stormy night…

“I just found out something.”

“What?”

“Apparently, they block every single type of peer-to-peer sharing at Oxford.”

“You can probably get around it, somehow.”

“No, you can’t. Everything — everything — is prohibited; BitTorrent, Limewire, IRC, even DC++! The bastards even restrict you from playing online games!”

“Pretty awful.”

“How am I supposed to get my TV fix? What about Lost? House? Heroes? What am I supposed to do? Tell me what to dooooo….”

“I think I speak for us all when I say, “You got wtfpwned when you took that scholarship”.”

I’ve noticed my friends never actually give me any useful advice. Ever. They just make up words like “wtfpwned” in an effort to keep me on my toes and constantly amused. But that’s what we call real friendship, n’est-ce pas?

Sometimes I feel guilty about not posting. Well. A lot of times, actually.

Then I take a tour of the blogosphere, and I notice nobody else has updated their shit, either.

So I feel a little bit less guilty.

That explains why nothing — absolutely nothing — gets done around here.

So the last time we check on our venerable hero, he was starring in the fourth season of the hit Fox show, House, M.D., looking to catch the eye of a particular Dr. Allison Cameron…

Thing is, I left you all on a bit of a cliffhanger, right?

So let’s start with the basics.

The first thing we need is a love function.

Attraction has got to measured in some way, right?

A love function provides a measure of how attracted you are to someone else. You’ve all seen guys nudging each other subtly (or not so subtly) and whispering, “Dude, check out that nine”. Or something to that effect.

That’s a love function in nature, folks.

But we’ll go ahead and make the following definition:

P(t) = Phil’s attraction to Dr. Cameron as a function of the time.

A graphical depiction of such a love function would perhaps resemble the following,

As you can see, my attraction to Dr. Cameron goes through several phases as the seasons progressed: (1) an initial fast growth, when I was all smitten, (2) a fast decline into deep despair when she decided to grow out those stupid bangs in Season 3 (see right), and finally (3) a quick ascent back to blissful, puppy-like attraction.

Be sure to also distinguish the appropriate axis on the left. A positive value of the love function means you wanna get your mack on. A negative value means you’d rather go home and do some math.

And as you can imagine, one can come up with endless types of love functions, each of which can be analyzed mathematically. For example, that lustful adolescent love I’m sure we all felt when we met our first love can perhaps be modeled as an exponential growth:

And what of love after marriage? Well I assume after the honeymoon phase, the love function would be a sort of an exponential decay:

And according to my empirical analysis, most women exhibit love functions that are ‘randomly’ oscillatory — vague, unpredictable and seemingly chaotic:

Honestly, I’d throw in a discontinuity (or ten) and some other mathematical nastiness, but I try not to let my personal feelings run rampant.

But see, when we start to model our relationships, it’s not enough to know whether one person is in love with another. It’s equally important to know how fast or how slow this process is taking!

Compare, for example, the difference between a hot and heavy 2 week fling while vacationing in the Bahamas with say, a 10 year unrequited love from afar.

From a distance, both scenarios could very well resemble the above exponential growth — that is, a love that’s growing positively as time progresses. The real difference is found in the rate of change or speed that the couple falls in love.

A two week (or two day) affair would probably explosive, with a lightning fast rate of change. On the other hand, a 10 year unrequited romance would perhaps be a slow burning process — certainly not explosive.

Those of you who have taken Calculus or Physics will simply recognize this as the derivative of the love function. But if you haven’t (or more likely, if it’s been too long), all you need to know is that it’s vitally important we study both the level of attraction, and how fast or slow the attraction is growing (or dying).

P’(t) = How fast is Phil digging (or not digging) Dr. Cameron.

Notice the little prime (’) here which indicates that this function measures the rate or speed of attraction, not the amount. So in the above graph, P’(t) would be very large for an explosive attraction. But for a slow-burning and lengthy attraction, P’(t) would be quite small.

And of course, P’(t) could also be negative, which would indicate a growing dislike.

Phew! That’s enough mathematizing for one day, wouldn’t you say?

In the next part of this series, we’re going to finally get our hands dirty and start looking into the dynamics of relationships.

In fact, I’m going to mathematically prove why the Cameron-Chase relationship is doomed to fail.

Which totally leaves the door open for me.