Once upon a time, there was a graph theorist. She was surrounded by loving friends, but did not always know how to express her affection.

“Not to get too intimate, but for so much of my life, the outdegree of my affections has far exceeded the indegree.”

Sometimes her love of graph theory made it hard to empathize with others, who seemed to lack awareness of even the simplest properties of degree structure.

“More frustratingly, the papers I cite always have more citations than my own papers.”

And sometimes she tried to fuss with concrete examples so that they’d better exhibit neat theoretical properties.

This is a great habit for mathematicians.

It is not a great habit for friends.

“According to Braess’s paradox, if friendly banter begins to flow between you and me, it could actually lower the speed of banter transmission in our friend group, by inducing additional banter. I can’t let that happen.”

But soon she learned that by teaching graph theory, she could help heighten the connectivity of her own social graph.

She found this very rewarding.

“Or, as I like to call it, ‘one degree of whoever the hell you want.’”

Eventually, she found a home among people who spoke her language and appreciated her quirky way of seeing their social fabric.

And they all lived happily asymptotically after.

“Actually, the word ‘tautological’ is just an abbreviation of ‘totally logical, and thus, a valuable contribution to the discourse; thank you for making that astute point.’”

Published