Love is Not Good For My Career

Falling in love is awesome.  Amazing. Fabulous.  I can't come up with enough words to say how truly Great these past few weeks have been.

*  However  *

There are also few words to describe adequately the level of uselessness to which I have descended at work as a consequence of all this wonderfulness.  This is caused by many factors:

1) Exhaustion.  Being on the phone talking to John into the wee hours every night does not make 6 a.m. arrive any later. I'm running on about 5 hours of sleep a night.  This is not contributing to snappy writing on the job.

2) Hangover. Being on the phone talking and drinking into the wee hours.... see above. There have been several mornings on which I was convinced, on first waking, that one of those fuzzy caterpillars that are so prevalent this spring had cleverly replaced my tongue.  I'm a bit fuzzy myself until about 10:30 a.m., and then regain functionality only with the helpful ingestion of Monster hits or truly shocking amounts of coffee.

3) Facebookitis.  The compulsion to check facebook every three minutes looking for messages from John. Or, once messages arrive, to engage in meaningless instant message chat while the museum burns down around me. There's another form of this affliction which involves coming up with clever things to post to his FB page.  All of this is also, I'm sure, excruciating for our friends who are obliged to endure it indirectly.

4) Googoo eyes.  This is probably the most embarrassing of the symptoms.  This is the helpless need to pull up pictures of the beloved on my computer and gaze at them stupidly for minutes at a time while my brain leaks out my ears.

5)  Space Jamosis. Listening to every song he's ever posted on his FB page, and/or cruising Spotify to find music that will add to the growing imaginary soundtrack of our relationship that I'm building.

6)  Levitation.  Floating on air feels lovely, but I can't write when my feet don't touch the ground.

Someday I suppose I'll have to come down from this two-week high I've been on, if only to assure that I remain gainfully employed.

Other than these slight oddities of behavior, I think I'm dealing with the whole thing rather well.  Granted, I'm stopping by his house every morning to smooch his face before I go to work, where I do little but daydream about him until I get home and can start planning our next meeting before getting into bed to talk to him by phone until one of us passes out.

I suppose it's good to know that the feeling of falling in love remains the same even at the ripe old age of 45.  I'm sure if I compared my behavior now to my behavior when I first fell in love as a teenager, the only differences would be my hair color and jeans size. It's absolutely reduced me to a giggling 16-year-old. In spite of all the lessons so painfully learned at the romantic school of hard knocks I've been subjected to over the intervening 29 years, I still succumb as readily to love as ever.  It is a powerful intoxicant, and frankly I've no interest in resisting.

I've said it jokingly on numerous occasions, but it's true that I really was starting to worry that I was turning into a jaded old dame -- that old broad at the end of the bar with a cigarette and a glass of scotch, rasping on about what shits men are.  Whew.  Dodged the bullet on that one.  I must remember to thank John especially for that when I see him next.

Which, incidentally, is all I can think about....