Authors Warning: This is an atypical post. It is not a rant. It is not a review of either foreign or domestic policy. It is not an impassioned soliloquy about the small injustices of life. It is quite simply something I have never written before. You have been warned.

It’s funny how people come along when you least expect them. It’s even more surprising when you can spend all day chatting with them and wonder where the time went. Stranger still, when you look forward to the next text message or email and think ten minutes is too long to wait. It’s strange ground for someone whose stock in trade is being cold under pressure and unflappable in the face of adversity.

I feel like I’m 16 years old again and walking around the alma mater with a dopy grin on my face… yup, yup, yup (A few of you guys might have actually gotten that reference, but you’d have to have been there a long time ago for it to make any sense at all, I suppose). I’m working hard to process things with the rational part of my brain, but all that keeps occurring to me are tired analogies jumbled with a hundred other thoughts including that I could be making a giant ass of myself right here in the pages of my very own blog. Of course at the moment, I’m going to block out that thought and carry on happily oblivious to that issue.

The more pressing issue, is what the hell do you actually do when you’ve met someone you want to know better. Punching her and running to the other side of the playground seems inappropriate somehow and I’m not about to scale the local water tower to paint anything on its side. I’ve been so focused on the other things that quite frankly I think I’ve forgotten how adults are supposed to flirt. Hell, at this point, I’d settle for inept teenage flirting skills.

I’ve gone about my life writing off this kind of possibility. It’s the one crisis I haven’t spent any time thinking about. I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

Then again, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.