An Open Letter to My Fellow Sherman Ave Writer Genghis Leprechaun

Dear Genghis Leprechaun, I want to let you know, first and foremost, that I do not write this with anger. Nor do I intend to drag the often borderline illegal activities of the Sherman Ave writers staff into the harsh light of day. In this letter, I simply wish to address something that has pained me dearly: the failing and currently doomed nature of our friendship.

To explain the concerns I have calculated our friendship on the basis of Friendship Component Suitability Scores, a metric that involves scoring a person in five categories in order to determine their suitability to be your friend. These are the expected numbers I calculated when I first met you compared to the numbers I have just derived.

As you can see, you have fallen short of my expectations in nearly every category, and while those scores are horrible, there is a clear dysfunction between us that has stifled our burgeoning friendship.

I have determined that the origin of this is the fact that, when I pass you walking to class and give you the “chin up” nod, you nearly never return it. This emotional disconnect between us has become the largest stumbling block. As you can see, your response rate to my nods has been decreasing since hitting a peak in the “interesting acquaintance” phase.

I’m at a loss for an explanation as to why you refuse to return my nods, but in order to overcome this puzzling phenomenon, I committed to developing a model for the progression of a friendship in order to best determine what can be done from here. This has led to the invention of the Shartwright Interpersonal Relationship Progression Model, presented below.

I would estimate, applying this model, that we have progressed down the rightward tree to the “inconsequential action” phase of interpersonal relationships. In the ideal developing friendship, you would participate in these interactions so we could progress onward from this point. However, your refusal to do so has left me questioning.

I have developed two model friendships in order to test my hypothesis. In Model A, you found me to be an intriguing character before realizing how cool I was and moving to improve our friendship. In Model B, you found me repulsing and refused to interact with me as our chances at lasting friendship were crushed. Here is a chart of those two models plotted on the Percent Nods Return graph.

As you can see, you clearly did not find me repulsing because the pattern of nod return followed Model A when it departed from Model B. However, just when Model A jumps from 60-70% (acquaintances) to over 80% (good friends), you refused to take the jump and instead let nod returns sink into the “are you fucking kidding me” level.

I have hypothesized that you may be scared of where this relationship will take you. In order to assuage your fears I have prepared a probability chart of certain life events happening between us in the next ten years for each model friendship.

As you can see, moving our friendship away from the current stagnation and towards Model A, there are no limits to how far we can go together. However, if you continue to let our relationship towards Model B, we will never know what we were missing out on.

So with all this presented, I hope you will consider returning my head nods.

Sincerely,

Cornelius Shartwright