On The Station Agent:

Shannon told me about this film years ago, she just kept mentioning it in passing. It was a bit strange, she never does this. Anyway, I'm glad she did. Who knows why she thought I'd like it. It features a random obsession on old trains ... which I don't have. Maybe she thought i'd like the whole outsider theme, it's about a dwarf and being isolated by society and finally becoming isolationist, living out in the woods in an abandoned train station. Anyway, I sympathized with Finbar, you know, I feel like a freak sometimes, I look different and I'm sensitive to that. Growing up that way can be painful, and sometimes you wonder what it is that connects you to others, if we aren't really all the same.

I have this theory that your heart has this repository of emotions, you're born with a huge range of emotions that you are able to feel, and you can dig them out as needed. Like jellybeans in a jar, you can pull out the purple one if that's your mood. So like, if someone is feeling a particular way, we hear it in their voice, we can feel it coming from their body, and if we're open to it, we recognize that same feeling in ourselves, in the jellybean jar. Like an old memory. So no matter how old you are, you can recognize, say a woman's grief when she loses her child. Which is what happens in the movie. And I cried. Which is silly, but I wondered at it, because I have nothing in my present experience to explain why I felt anything for it.