I never thought I’d say this, but nuns and noodles can change your life. Well, maybe they don’t change everyone’s, but they definitely changed mine. And not just once either, which is so freaky I don’t even know how to measure it with a spoon.

No one thinks nuns are going to be life-changing. Sorry, but that’s the truth. Especially not the kind of nuns who sing in trees and make clothes out of curtains like Maria in The Sound of Music, which is a musical extravaganza about not-your-usual-type-of-nun and whistling captains and singing children and double-crossing Nazi boyfriends and female deer and lonely goatherds high on a hill singing “layohlayohlay-eeh-oh.” Which sounds nuts, I know, but it kind of makes sense when you see the movie. Kind of. It’s still pretty nuts though, even then.

And I don’t even like noodles. But if something’s going to change your life, I guess noodles are better than the Black Death, a monster earthquake, a plague of poisonous frogs, or a million other terrible things.

This all happened a while ago now. Let me just say, I was a different person back then. I don’t know if you’re going to like the old me much when you hear what I was like, but I’ve changed. Stuff happened along the way—all kinds of stuff, actually. Nuns and noodles were just the beginning.

So maybe we should start there. At the very beginning.

It’s a very good place to start.