Is 2024 the year of tandem bicycles?

Hi Friend,

Sarah here!

It’s been a while, how are you doing? Has 2024 landed with you, or you in it? For me, it’s been a tumultuous start tbh. But I have also had a chance to try something very cool, so today I want to talk to you about passion projects. Specifically, passion projects that you can share with a friend.

As you know, Friendtimate and the Pen Pals Newsletter are Ricky’s and my passion project. It is bringing me so much joy to be recording podcast episodes, writing these newsletters, planning the arch for what is to come in season 3, etc. On top of that, I got to try something new in January. I took the morning off from my full time job and met up with a Hemingway Club to talk about making friends as an adult. A Hemingway Club is a club for men that are 60 years or older, an opportunity for them to meet up with other seniors once a week and talk or learn about a new topic. On January 12th, they asked me to come share with them about making new friends as an adult.

While it was a relatively small gathering, we had a really great and very open conversations around the joys and difficulties of friendship. About the fears that may hold one back when it comes to approaching potential friends and different strategies for overcoming them.

One of my favorite strategies is “be there” - if you know how much I love Winston Bishop from New Girl, you’d think I stole that strategy from him. But a las, this is actually founded in some research.

“Students' likeability ratings were 20 percent higher for the stranger who showed up to the class the most, compared to the one who showed up the least.” 
(Marisa G. Franco, 2019)

Sharing this passion project with a group of strangers was so much fun, and I felt so energized by their willingness to share their own thoughts and struggles around maintaining or making friendships. It is something I hope to do more of in 2024, and something I fully encourage you all to try too.

Next week’s episode is another quiz, and it was so much fun to record! We had originally recorded an episode of a game similar to Cards Against Humanity, except a PC-version, and it just didn’t work. So we went back to the tried and tested: a Friendship Qiuz revealing what kind of friends Ricky and I are in our respective friendships.

You may wonder why I am sharing about the absolute failure of the original episode? I am doing so because part of any project is figuring out what does not work, and let me tell you, that episode definitely didn’t work. Ricky and I will save you from the pain of listening through it, but it’s already become something we laugh about, because that’s really what “failure” is, an opportunity to learn, adapt, laugh at yourself a bit and move on. Not to get all preachy on you 😅 The point is, we laughed so much recording this new episode, and I cannot wait to share it with you all!

If you’d like to quiz along, then the quizzes can be found here:

1.  What kind of friend are you? By Psychologies.com

2. What you’re actually like as a friend by StellaCiaraPica13 on Buzzfeed.com 

Do passion projects have to involve people outside the friendship? Not at all!

Winnie and I recently discovered that we both read an obscene amount of fantasy books, so we made a two-person book club. After hours and hours of talking about the specific sub-genre of Fae-Fantasy, we realized that we both had a lot of ideas for a FF storylines ourselves, so we’ve created a writers-club too.

We have both always wanted to be writers and both found starting out the writing journey to be daunting, so we’ve decided to try tandem writing. When I was a kid, in that window between wanting to be an ice princess and a veterinarian, I wanted to be a writer. I dreamt up a ton of stories, but sadly didn’t write them down and have now forgotten them. But the dream always stayed, I was honestly just too scared to give it a try, because what if I am not good “enough” at it? Speaking with Winnie about it, she' agreed to try the tandem approach, and we’ve already had so much fun with it, that I cannot wait to see what magical plotlines and -twists we come up with. I don’t know if we will every share the writing with anybody else, but we are having so much fun with the process, that it really does not matter.

Is there something you’ve always wanted to try? Or maybe something you’re now itching to try out, but taking that jump on your own is a bit scary?