👟👠 Friends, gather round (#89)

Hi ! OMG, we made it. It’s finally December. The year has both flown and dragged; unfortunately I feel December is going to disappear too-quickly. Savour! This week I am thinking and writing about A - Eve D.❣️

I’m keeping this one short (hopefully) because a) everyone I know is super busy today and tomorrow, so I figure you are too and b) I have to write three of these newsletters today, since I don’t want to be writing them while I am away. I think next weeks’ newsletters will be lists. Maybe the perfect gift guide, books to read, movies to watch, people to follow? It would help if I had made notes on this already throughout the year. I didn’t, so not sure how well it will work out, but that’s the plan anyway.

Week in review…

🎄 Christmas everywhere! I attended a sit-down Christmas party on Sunday, and have been having Christmas lunches/coffees/breakfasts throughout the week. Love it. Have also received cute gifts along the way, but this hand made/designed card is my favourite thing by far. And just look at those earrings!

💰️ Kids actually managed to do the market, even though our Temu order full of China crap hadn’t arrived (yet). Micole baked cookies and Zac sold caramel popcorn (bought, not made) and they both had fun and made some money (although they didn’t hit the R1,000/each target). Still, lots of initiative shown here, and they fixed a broken situation, so well done. 

✈️ And my Temu order did eventually arrive and now I have 200 magnets and 1,000 stickers. They are late, but they are cute. I can now a) keep them for next year b) send them back c) sell them on my neighbourhood group. The last one is semi-appealing: Kids would package them into 20 bundles etc. But do I really want to deal with 20 people coming “past my house” at odd hours to pick them up? I feel like it would be a logistical nightmare. (Idea: Micole could drop them off?). I’ll see. 

📺️ And of course I watched Christmas movies, but still not as many as I’d like. A Castle for Christmas, Jingle Heist, My Secret Santa. They were…okay. But I want an amazing Christmas movie. Like Fred Clause, Dash and Lily (Netflix) or The Holiday. Maybe I should just watch those instead. 

🏉 G and I watched the rugby with friends (Zone 2, see below) and the Springboks dominated the game, the season and the sport in general. It has been amazing to watch them this year (thanks, G) and to really understand the nuance of the game. I’ll admit that before this year my “watching rugby” was basically me watching the score and cheering as SA won everything. It has been superb to watch what this team has done for the country, and I am so grateful to be here for it. Next year, I am definitely going to go watch a live game.

Winding down

I’m doing a week of admin. Literally braindumping everything into digital index cards. Things that will take four minutes to do but I have been putting off since February? Index card. (Example: I need to change my banking details on Amazon.com. For some reason, Amazon owes me money (I think from when I had affiliate links back in the day?) and they want to pay it to me but they have incomplete banking details. They email me every quarter, and every quarter I forget to go do it. Now there’s an index card for that). Of course, not all to-dos are that quick, but no matter what pops into my brain as a must-do, it gets its own card. I have dozens of cards already and my brain is still overflowing. Turns out it’s holding a lot, and this cannot be healthy.

I am well aware that putting things down on an index card is not the same as doing the thing. But the point of this exercise is to just dump stuff out of my head, and maybe organise it all (somehow) towards a plan to do it all.

This dumping exercise is surprisingly therapeutic and calming. I know that by the time I am done I will have literally hundreds of cards, but the hope is that I will also have an empty head (in a good way). The idea is that if I get a thought (“fuck, didn’t change those Amazon details”) then I can just dismiss with a simple “no worries, it’s already got an index card”. I feel like I’ll double my holiday mileage if I do this successfully, and will have a good system to hit the ground running in 2026.

On that note, I’m excited to write my end of year review! I have no idea what will be in it, but I feel as I have learnt a lot, and have a clear vision of what I will be doing next year. And I’m excited.

YouTube knows things...

I have a very particular way of listening to music 🤣 . I basically have near-zero discovery, other than new releases from artists I enjoy and the occasional tune I pick up from reels. This is very different from G, for instance, who has a massive playlist of liked music, and then allows YouTube to use that as a predictor for discovering similar new music. G listens to new music all the time, whereas I almost never do (unless I am in his passenger seat during a 12-hour drive down to the coast…ha ha ha).

Not to worry. YouTube Music, in my 2025 recap, tells me:

Also, I have listened to 16,000 minutes of music, and I think I like Taylor Swift.

But I’m not completely loyal:

Friendship and other matters….

Not sure if I have spoken about this before, but I have been thinking a lot about it lately, so hear me out. (I am thinking out loud, here). 

I.
There are broadly five different degrees of friendships, or FriendZones.  

Zone 1: Your besties. The smallest and tightest zone. These are your ride-or-die friends.
Zone 2: Friends you love, but you don’t necessarily spend a lot of time with. But when you do, you can chat for hours and have such a good time you wonder why you don’t do it more often. You’ll have these people over for dinner.
Zone 3: People you know and like. You run into them at a coffee shop, kids’ sport events or at mutual friends. You chat, you promise to get coffee, you probably never do. When someone mentions them in a conversation, you respond with  “oh, I know so-and-so, he’s a  friend of mine”. 
Zone 4: Colleagues, distant friends, people you interact with but don’t really know etc etc . You know them, you spend time with them, you might really like them, but they’re definitely not inviting you to their wedding.
Zone 5: Online friends. You possibly have never met them in your life, or have done so very briefly at some event. You know a surprising lot about them., and you have a mutual connection or understanding. I’m not talking parasocial stuff here, they actually know you too, and proactively engage. You talk privately, send each other funny memes and quick comments. You “know each other” but you probably don’t. A lot of you (readers of this newsletter) are like that for me! (You know who you are!). 

II. 
You can tell a lot about a person by how many friends they have in each circle. Not tell in a “good vs bad” way, but more in knowing their personality, level of introvertness etc. I do not think that more is better. And, in fact, maybe lots is not that good at all. In any case, there is no way you can have lots of friends in Zone 1. I think the max is five or six. But if you have only one, I think that is totally ok too. 

During my school years I was very polarised: I always had one best best friend, and very few other friends. To the point that if my one friend was sick on a school day, I was kind of stuck alone during break because I had no one else to hang out with. (Now that I am wiser, I know that that is because I created this high standard of friendship: you either were in Zone 1 or not at all. I had very few people in my Zone 2, even though lots of people had me in their Zone 2, if that makes any sense). 

III. 
There are venn circles within the Zones, which means people can “overlap”.  I spent all my school years with exactly six best friends in total, each of whom I remember perfectly, and none of them overlapped. So my school years, Zone 1 had one circle in it, and it was my one best friend. No one else. My college years I shifted, and I had 6 best friends, but they overlapped: there were 3 circles, one of which had four people (including me, we were all best friends), and two circles with one friend each. There was very little overlap between circles. One of those circles was my boyfriend…who was quite separate from my other best friends. Weird, no?  

Right now, I have five circles in my Zone 1, one friend each, and once again there is no overlap at all. My five best friends have almost never met each other (except Laura and G, who only met properly last week). 

IV. 
My point is that my arrangement is probably unusual. I think most people have friends that intermingle more than mine do. And I think the reason for this is that my Zone 1 relationships are all pretty intense, and the nature of those relationships don’t allow for much intermingling. I am not interested in what my one best friend thinks of my other best friend, because they each match a different emotional side of me and thus would by definition probably not get along (although this is disputed by the fact that Laura and G did get along, quite well). 

This is not true for Zone 2 and up, btw. Those friends can and should intermingle all they like. 

I don’t think most people are like me though. I am still trying to work through this, and figure out if it makes sense, and even if it’s right. Something for G and me to discuss on our upcoming loooong holiday drive.

What I watched…

This week we watched Train Dreams which is a beautiful movie about a very simple story of one ordinary man. This movie is award-winning type, and has the scenery as a main character. I enjoyed it immensely.

Looking ahead…

It’s going to be busy, but not necessarily work-busy. This time next week I am on holiday, so I need to pack and prepare, and tie up loose ends. If possible, I am hoping to go to hairdresser and chop off my hair (not all of it, no). I’m house sitting for my sister, writing newsletters, and also still have two very important meeting next week - probably the most important of the whole year!

Enjoy your weekend/week!

Thanks for reading!

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