“What are you doing, darling? What’s all this scrawl?”
“I’m trying to think of a way to set out all the ups and downs of my illness, without it getting completely boring and confusing.”
“What you need,” Pete says, “is a graph.”
“A graph?”
“Yes. You’ve got two main variables—time and light sensitivity—and you plot one against the other.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you put time as the abscissa—”
“The what?”
“The abscissa.” He draws lines on my notebook. “And light tolerance as the ordinate.”
“Do you mean the x coordinate and the y coordinate?”
“Yes—those are the mathematical names.”
“Goodness,” I say, getting excited, “I’ve never heard the word ‘abscissa.’ ”
Pete is the only person I know who, though completely unpretentious and unassuming, will periodically use, in the course of everyday conversation, a word that is entirely new to me, and then stomp about insisting that he does not know what the fuss is about, and that whatever it is is a “perfectly normal word.” I must confess I find this rather erotic.
So I plot time along the x-axis, and light tolerance along the y-axis, stack the different years on top of each other so the graph is not too long and thin, and the result is:
Fig. 1: Variation of light tolerance over time in one highly photosensitive female