If you ever want to do anything strange, simply fall in love. Being in love makes you do weird things. Like whirl breathless down Madison Avenue in a sweeping, skipping motion. Or smile so wide your face cracks sideways. You no longer cut the line at Starbucks or hog two subway seats. You'd even consider doing cartwheels if you had not pulled a muscle last time you attempted one in an Edward's Supermarket parking lot after opening your first bank account.

Thankfully love has not propelled you (yet?) to the point where you draw silly little hearts and smiley faces all over everything you own, including your shoes and skin. But it has prompted you to send goofy e-mails and listen closely to the words of what you usually consider sappy love songs on the radio. Love also makes you want to leap from the tallest cliff and scream "The world is on my side!"

Your brain may respond haltingly to such an assault of positive emotion, especially if the only time in the past you considered plummeting from the tallest cliff was when in a deep mire of depression. But love can change all that. As long as you don't freak out in the interim, and stop listening to those evil voices in your head that are trying to convince you that the feeling is way too grand to be real.

An authoritative, scratchy voice is in there bellowing out that you must be delusional, reading too many of those Danielle Steel books or perhaps are suffering from a massive fever that is melting your cranium. Another voice tells you it's all a fluke – that it can't be love but it's just coincidence because your first "date" was on Valentine's Day and there must be some reason other than a potent spiritual connection that you guys often think the same thoughts at the exact same moment. One more voice says you don't deserve anything good and there's an ulterior motive to it all anyway.

Perhaps the other person was hired by the trick-people police and is merely showering you with so much grace and attention because they really want to steal all your poetry ideas.

Squash them -- squash those voices like squirming bugs. Scrape them off your shoe and flush them down the toilet (which you just scrubbed six times since love also makes you meticulous with housecleaning). Just as you cannot run from the onslaught of pain, you cannot flee from love.

It even invades your dreams, this love stuff. "Invade," however, is a somewhat negative way to put it, conjuring images alien pods or ringworm. Perhaps a better choice would be "pervade," "suffuse" or waft like a warm, scented breeze from the nearest Dunkin' Donuts.

To test reality, you talk to other people who are either happily married or have a long-standing steady. They tell you love is great, it has its own agenda and, just like a temper-tantrumed toddler, you cannot control it. Don't fight it, they tell you, go with the flow, ride it like a tidal wave, straddle it with both arms and hang on for the whirly-gig ride.

You erroneously talk to two others who have no significant other. One tells you not to go to his house because he intends to shoot and kill you; the other asks where he works, what grad school he went to, and if he's from a blueblood stock in England. You dare not call your friend who won't even say the word "love," not even to about a bowl of corn flakes. You cross these people off your Christmas card list, telling them if you end up dead they can surely have your houseplants.

As you dabble more in this varicose emotion, you begin to see that you do, in fact, have a capacity for love that has been in your heart all along. Perhaps it has just been sleeping, hiding, or overpowered by the world's cache of negatives. You begin to see your feeling of love is not limited to only one individual, but that you actually love your family, your pets, your job sometimes even, your new fur coat and your friends, at least the ones who don't tell you you'll be murdered. Your love, too, is not limited to earthly things but to the sky and the stars and the wind and the sun and maybe once you will even love the rain. And you love, yes, you love, whirling breathless down Madison Avenue.
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