The giddy e-mail face

Maybe a month or so ago, I was going to write a blog post about something I'll refer to as the "giddy e-mail face." For those of you who are not immediately familiar with it, this is the face that involuntarily and uncontrollably seizes your face--generally making you break out into what should, by all rights, be a face-cracking smile--when you receive an e-mail from that certain someone.

This is a mis-leading name, however, because in my experience the face does not just appear as a result of e-mail. Voicemails, IMs ,text messages and talking on the phone are also not safe from this exceedingly visible and often embrassing reaction to another person. Hell, I've seen friends carry out whole, in-person conversations with their object of affection with the giddy face firmly intact. Someone even had the nerve to accuse me of doing just that. They were, of course, mistaken.

I have had a lot of recent experience with the giddy face. It seems that suddenly everyone I know has a crush, or is dating someone, or is in love and so the giddy face is now everywhere. Whole conversations have been devoted to the cute things they said or did that prompted the face. Even more conversations have been devoted to bafflement about having this reaction at all.

I have definitely been in the latter camp of conversations. I had always assumed that I was way too cynical and too guarded and too jaded ever to be afflicted with something as goofily, grossly cute as the giddy face. The last time I experienced the giddy face, I'm pretty sure, was when as a freshman in high school, the student body president/captain of the soccer team talked to me one day in the cafeteria.

And yet it has suddenly returned, publicly embarassing me and causing my friends to stare at me and say things like "I don't think I've ever seen you like this. It's kind of. . . weird." Yeah, it is kind of weird. I'm not really sure that I like it.

But then again, maybe it's good to know you're capable of that level of feeling, that level of excitement, that level of hope. Maybe it's good that my ability to believe in romance and love didn't die in 9th grade with a soccer player named Ryan Sullivan. Maybe.