When I introduced this month’s IndieWeb Carnival theme belief, I was terribly excited to take a quiet Saturday morning and really put together a beautiful piece on how I relate to the theme.

We make plans, and God laughs. In late October, God laughed when I triple-fractured my ankle. My original recovery timeline, which included surgery under general anesthesia, had me use first a cast and then an air cast until December 25. Tomorrow. But we make plans, and God laughs.

As we approach the end of 2024 (wow, already?!) I’m pleased to do something I have been anticipating for months: host the December 2024 edition of the IndieWeb Carnival ( What is that?).

The theme is belief

It’s an open theme, one that I hope will inspire you to share whatever pops into your head when you think about it. A few prompts to merely inspire you:

• What is something you can’t know, but that you believe?
• What’s something you wish you could unbelieve?
• How do you relate to the word “belief”?

Guidelines

1. Submit in English or any language open to online translation tools
2. Submit in any medium as long as it produces a single URL
3. Send it to me on or before December 31, 2024
4. Use the email address zinzy {at} pm {.} me and the subject “IndieWeb Carnival on Belief”

As always, I need some time to digest this theme myself. A link to my post will appear on this page. I’ll publish a round-up post of submissions on January 1, 2025. I was able to quickly jot down some thoughts of my own while compiling the list of submissions right before I went in for a week-long hospital stay.

I had the pleasure of being the +1 at The Black Archives Bijlmer Book Club, where we read Travis Alabanza’s None of the Above. Meredith and Wally were excellent hosts, and I loved meeting new people with similar interests.

I had strong feelings about Alabanza’s insistence that this work “feels like theory”, in response to it being marketed as a memoir. Calling Get Out a comedy diminishes the value of Black storytelling in horror narratives. But calling it a documentary is just as ineffective. “Feels like theory” very much sits in that spectrum, for me.

I enjoyed the lively conversation my strong feelings sparked about respectability and Black works, and was surprised the lyrical essay appears to be such an unknown genre when I offered it.

The first and last photos were taken by Wouter Pocornie.

They open their roti takeout, unfold their pancake, and start eating. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it. I ask them if it’s okay that I watch them eat before I start, so I can see how in the world I’m supposed to eat sauce without cutlery.

My pastors have a way with words. Bible study on Thursday, and we use every pronoun but he reading Mark 6:1-13. She’s just a carpenter — Mary’s girl. Who does she think she is? Give me a second, let me hear that again.