I burned my tongue eating soup tonight. It was chicken flavored; in the same way that red jellybeans are supposed to be strawberry flavored. They just taste red. My mom likes the red-flavored jellybeans. If you ask her she will list all her favorite flavors in order, first to last.

I got to play with a five-year-old last weekend. His last favorite was root beer. He has 500 favorites, he told me. He likes chocolate too. And pizza. And desserts and food were in different categories—500 favorite desserts and 500 favorite foods. I was not allowed to count cake as a favorite food.

I made a cake yesterday with chocolate mint frosting and two layers. I cooked it for 37 minutes because that is how long it takes. I would know because I cook them all the time. I love cake. I love the way it represents celebration and I love the fact that I know how long to cook it for and that I can make it and impress everyone.

That’s what my life really is. A string of events in which I impress or am impressed. Each motion links to another and my thoughts and feelings all blur together until, at the end of the day, I sort them through. I put them in buckets. I have a color-coded system for my buckets and no one else can decipher the system and they’re impressed.

One year ago in June I wrote, “there is a sad deep feeling found when you want to say, "I wish I was..." but cannot think of anything.”

I saw Garden State tonight. I was warned that the movie would change my life. I was warned that it was independant and artsy and rated R.

Well, it changed my life. Andrew Largeman says, Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

When I was 18, I would drive. I would drive and drive and drive following lights or sounds and tears would fall. I wouldn’t come back until I was done and I would return to my life and its string of events. I can’t drive anymore; I can’t ever be alone.

And I want to go back and sit in the theatre with Andrew Largeman and follow the lights and the sounds. The film made me want to call the people closest to me. I wanted to talk to every person who had ever touched my life. I wanted to reconnect, to love and be loved, and to appreciate humanity.

I am so often churned up in our fallen world. I am so often frustrated with sin and passiveness and our inevitable death.

A movie made me feel hope. I walked out wanting to love. Not in a distant heavenly way, but in a real today way. And I can feel it.