Today is Emancipation Day in the Netherlands, a day on which we commemorate the abolishment of slavery in our “former” colonies. There is a march, a ceremony by the national monument, and a festival known for its danceable music, long lines for great food, and lovely market. I’ve taken the day off, and will be going to Museumplein with a friend to celebrate, and to hopefully score a new wooden afro pick.
It was the mid zeroes, and, barely an adult, I considered everything I did during that week in London a life-altering experience. Staying at the studio of my friend Titus, a fashion photographer I knew through a website I remember as mailfriends.com, I took in every second of my first solo trip abroad.
My very first (and the high I’m still chasing) fish and chips rolled into a grease-covered newspaper. The Virgin Megastore in Piccadilly Circus where, a year later, we would spot one of Banksy’s fake copies of that Paris Hilton album. The weirdly polite British “excuse me” offered whenever I stepped on someone’s toes on the tube. Watching Hard Candy twice in a row, Mulholland Drive thrice. Looking back, everything from then feels like a museum.
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.
The November edition of the IndieWeb Carnival is about impact. Host Xandra invites us to reflect on, among other things, “what has made the biggest impact on your personality?”
A golden retriever-like,
glitter-in-your-face
enthusiasm for life
is one way
I sometimes use
to describe myself.
I see it appear in the
Get Well Soon card
my coworkers put together.
“I miss your smile!”
“I miss my compliments!”
I am but
one day out of my cast.
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?).
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:
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.
The August edition of the IndieWeb Carnival is about rituals. Host Steve is interested in how they shape us, how they’ve changed over time, and whether we like them or not.
I love a ritual. The word alone ladens the room in my head with the sultry air I expect from a monastery. It gives me Caravaggesque sunlight, high contrast, beaming its way to a church floor, illuminating austere dust particles on the way there. You can take the Catholic child out of the heartland, but… It’s safe to say the word “ritual” is single-handedly responsible for 70 per cent of my Etsy rosary purchases.
The July edition of the IndieWeb Carnival is about tools. Host James is interested in the relationship between tools and our creative practices.
Remember Flickr, and the way we self-published visual sneak peeks into our lives on that website, in the mid-zeroes? If we wanted a filter in our photo, we had to Photoshop it in there ourselves. We tagged our uploads, but merely to archive our materials. Our profiles all contained a link to our personal blog.
