I’m watching Night at the Museum for the first time and it’s unexpectedly pretty and heartwarming. 
Thanksgiving Movie
Quotidian: Cathedral
by Amy Holt
“It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
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Poetry: Crown for a Young Marriage
This excerpt is from one of my favorite contemporary poems, which was just selected by Rattle for one of this year’s Pushcart Prize nominations. Extraordinary, illuminated.
If I was nothing else, but was a wife;
If I did nothing else, but could make meals
with scraps and pantry staples and a knife
I got when I was twenty-nine; if real
commitment (an abstract and noble word
before it tangles up with sacrifice)
turns out to mean a smaller life, less heard,
less heralded, less published, and less prized;
if after spending summer days indoors
for several years, and writing frightening verse
I’m eighty-odd and pale and little more
than what I am today, will I be worse
off than my single, roving poet friends?
I doubt it, but you’ll have to ask me then.
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I doubt it, but you’ll have to ask me then.
I doubt that I’ll be doddering and hunched
and wishing I could do it all again
because I felt I’d missed out on a bunch
of fellowships. And Christ, I love you. Christ
do I remember loneliness, and what
I did for scraps of evenings, what sufficed
for kindness. Offer me a life, a glut
of love, of undeserved reserves of grace
and nice interpretations of my faults.
I’ll still find ways to be unhappy. Face
the facts, though—I’m at home filling the salt
shakers, cleaning the microwave, unknown.
But staunchly, resolutely unalone.
-Mary Block (view her website here)
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The 100 Bellamy Clarke Fanfiction – Reunion
A few weeks back I wrote my first (and so far only) fanfiction. What is it that inspired intense enough passion in this girl to lead me to finally turn to fanfiction after years of writing other formats?
The CW’s The 100. Which has turned out to be so much better than it has any right to be,a dark, gritty, romantic survivalist tale of four young people who blossom into leaders, fighters, and fierce defenders of the remnants of the human race left on earth. I highly recommend it if you haven’t tried it yet (the first two episodes are okay but not great and then it hooks from there) – even critics who initially ignored it are slowly picking it up and becoming fans, including NPR Pop Culture Hour‘s Joanna Robinson. The show it reminds me of most is Lost, though it’s (obviously) not nearly as brilliant.
Reunion
Clarke saw him across the clearing and something inside her seemed to come suddenly to rest. He was covered in dirt and blood but the same driving force of will, the same steadiness, that had made her trust him before against all her better judgement, still hung on him, as he stood steady as a rock, taller than anyone else, his dark, broody eyes searching the scattered crowd.
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Fall and Umbrella
Did you write today? Did you make art? Did you let a glaze of raindrops sweep across your opened palm? Let light in, let air, let hope and breathing. Let fall sweep you up with its voluminous wings into crisp mouthfuls of breezes, cherry tea steaming, warm on fingers and in cafes, rain on clear windows and clearer umbrellas – let it make you come more awake.
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Pan Official Trailer – Starring Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara, Garrett Headland
Joe Wright is a master of bringing a cohesive, deft magic to updated versions of old stories (Pride and Prejudice anyone), so I’m excited for this. Stars Hugh Jackman, Amanda Seyfried, Rooney Mara, Garrett Headland and Levi Miller.
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Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan Experience a Night Thunderstorm while Stranded on Nikumaroro Island
We hadn’t had water for days.
It must have hit
one hundred degrees
that afternoon.
Night lightning revealed land crabs
parrying
at the clearing’s edge,
betting on whether
me or Amelia
would die of thirst first.
As the storm broke,
we upturned cans
to catch the runnels of rain
funneling off our hammock.
We sprinted to the beach,
upturned our mouths
like tulips to the downpour.
The storm signaled its departure
in an hour,
its strobes diminishing,
deluge dying to a mist.
We laughed
as we returned
to the camp.
By then it was dawning.
We knew the fire
would be snuffed
as a candle,
crabs crowding the puddles for a drink.
I picked them up
one by one
and pinched their claws off.
Those detached V’s
flexing by the dozen
at my feet.
Amelia ripped
them from their turrets,
tossed the writhing meat
to shrieking terns.
She gathered the empty shells
in the folds of her skirt,
returned to the beach
to wade knee deep
in the waves,
then dumped them clattering
hollow amid the surf’s
persistent thunder.
-Paul David Atkins, Blue Lyra Review
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Book Love: Silence
SILENCE, by Amorito Citrella
The books held her in a total silence, a depth and richness she’d never imagined, that made the air hum and the pages vibrate with a music and a promise of hope, of magic, of adventure, of home, of thousands of worlds to be lived in across the smooth, slippery brown boards (made for dancing) of the library room…
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Scatola Coffee in Chiang Mai, Thaland
Coffee and Irony 