I’ll take an independent film over a blockbuster any day, and this past weekend I saw a good one. It’s called Trumbo—the story of screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo. If you don’t know him by name, you know his work.

In 1947, Trumbo, along with nine other writers and directors, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify on the presence of Communist influence in Hollywood. Trumbo refused to cooperate. He was blacklisted, and eventually, spent 11 months in prison in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky. Once released from prison in the early 1950s, Trumbo continued to write scripts—such as Roman Holiday and The Brave One both of which went on to win Academy Awards—under different names. In 1960, after ten years of writing under a pseudonym, staring actor Kirk Douglas decided to make public Trumbo’s credit for writing Spartacus. This was the beginning of the end of the blacklist.

It’ll come as no surprise that my favorite aspect of the documentary is that the story is powerfully told through the words of Dalton Trumbo’s letters as read by Joan Allen, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, Donald Sutherland, Michael Douglas, and Brian Dennehy.

I was just made aware of the fact that this humble Web site you see before you was mentioned on the Tyra Banks Show as part of a “make your life easier” story. Thank you Tyra! If you need a letter written on your behalf, you know where I am.

True story: I was applying for a job a few months back. I dutifully e-mailed my cover letter and resume and, once they were sent, immediately came up with my “follow-up” plan. The listing specifically said, “No phones calls,” so I scratched that idea but then I thought What good does it do to follow-up with an e-mail if you haven’t received a response to your first e-mail? I decided to follow-up with a note. I really did. It was a short handwritten note (thank-you note sized) that said something along the lines of, “I hope this finds you well. I sent my cover letter and resume a few days ago, and I’d very much like to have the chance to meet with you.” I’m sure I reiterated my interest in the position, too, and also wrote my e-mail address at the bottom. You get the idea. I mailed the note the same day I e-mailed my resume—planning it so she’d receive it two or three days later. Done and done.

The following week I received an e-mail from the hiring editor saying she received my note but not my e-mail. Apparently, the e-mail went straight into her spam file (um, G-mail what’s up with that?) The real live note, however, got to her and she then wrote and asked me to re-send my official papers. Isn’t that cool? I didn’t get the job. But who cares. Had I not sent my note I would have had no shot whatsoever at the job—completely unbeknownst to me. I sent the e-mail and received nothing from my good friend Mailer Daemon saying it wasn’t delivered. I would have sat and wondered. My follow-up note alleviated the wondering.

Think this was a freak accident? Think again. This past weekend, The New York Times did a nice write up on this very problem—sometimes e-mails really just don’t go through: IN THE E-MAIL RELAY, NOT EVERY HANDOFF IS SMOOTH

In an arguably morbid conversation, my sister and I were discussing our funerals the other day. The two of us are pretty irreverent when it comes to death—this, naturally, drives my parents mad—and we were laughing out loud over it. We’re not death-obsessed Goth queens, we just know that it’s a part of life and have decided to approach it with a sense of humor. I’m 27 and she’s 25, so this isn’t necessarily around the corner for either of us—but you never know. I asked her what type of funeral she’d like and she said, “That’s up to you. The funeral isn’t for the dead, it’s for the living.” I found that to be a keen insight on her part. The funeral is a place for the living to gather, comfort each other and gain whatever closure they can. The dead have little to nothing to do with the funeral.

In a somewhat strange tie in—if it can get stranger than my sister and I planning our funerals—I applied this same logic to the recent unveiling of Mother Teresa’s letters of doubt. This week’s Time magazine offers a comprehensive look into her secret life as one who often felt denied of the presence of God. In a September 1979 letter Teresa wrote to the Rev. Michael Van Deer Peet, “Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me—the silence and the emptiness is so great—that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear.”

It was Mother Teresa’s wish that these letters be destroyed. In a move that some might consider disrespectful, the church overruled that wish—the letters now appear in a book entitled Mother Teresa: Come By My Light (Doubleday). Yet in the same way that a funeral is for the living, so these letters are now for the living. When I hear of the doubts and uncertainties of a soldier and sage like Mother Teresa I don’t hold her in a lower regard, but it grants me solace to know that she, too, was human and had doubts as everyone does. The article purports that Teresa came to accept the doubt within her as part of Christ’s suffering. Meaning she shared in his desolate hour of, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” I find it beyond admirable that her work never ceased in light of her private torment. She moved forward and continued to give all of her time to those who needed it the most.

One would think Teresa’s reason for not wanting the world to read her letters is obvious—because she didn’t want to people to know she wasn’t of a faithful mindset at all times and in all places. But that is inaccurate. She explained to the Rev. Lawrence Picachy that if the letters became public, “people will think more of me—less of Jesus.” I admire that as well. She was humble until the end and wanted to protect Jesus even though she felt abandoned by him. For me, she was right about one part and not the other. There isn’t much that could make me think less of Jesus, however, I do think more of Mother Teresa.