When I was a high-school kid, I fell in love like a lemming into the deep: quickly, breathtakingly, and irrevocably. My first steady girl was bad for me, and everyone but me knew it. Her scent drove me wild and made me nauseous; sometimes at the very thought of it I'd cough a spaghetti dinner into the can. Lovesick fool!

Is the way we fall in love with someone a thing we're born with, or a thing we learn? I've always felt like it wasn't love if it didn't tumble my innards, and I've acted accordingly all along. If my high school sweetheart, call her T for Trouble, wore no perfume or if I simply ate less pasta before a date, would love come to me without a leaping gut? Which came first, the chicken or the chalypso?

Hop forward with me a few years, to New York in the early part of this decade, where I had just weeks before moved; I stayed a couple weeks on the lower East side before a month of cat-sitting and free rent opened up for me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Since I had six weeks without expense, I took to walking around the city during the day and visiting friends in the evening, where we'd play hours of Sega Dreamcast, playing through an unparalleled catalogue of tremendous games: sports like tennis, basketball, and football, gun-controller games like House of the Dead, and what we called The Perfect Game: Powerstone II played in "Original" mode as Galuda, on the red team, against three Chefs, all on the blue team, on the space elevator level, difficulty level eight. The only way to win is to play the perfect game. It took me two years to win my first, and out of the thousand-odd matches I've played, I've won around thirty.

For gun games, we had gun controllers. For driving games, we had a steering wheel. But our favorite controller, for two of our favorite games, was the fishing rod. Dear reader, Sega Bass Fishing and its sequel, Marine Fishing, are phenomenal games, worth becoming very good at, for reasons that will become particularly clear to most of you by the end of my story, and may be already clear to the unusually perceptive.

The two games are similar: Bass Fishing is better, not just for the game mechanics and fun involved, but for the bizarre computer-generated shouts of your assistant as you lure fish to your boat: "HOOK IT!" "It's gonna be a big one!" "You've won a special lure!" "Lake Area!" But Marine Fishing is the point of the story, and I was a top virtual fisherman, hauling in sailfish and trevally by the ton, using the special controller to cast, manipulate the lure, and reel in the big ones.

A week or so after I moved out to Brooklyn, on a Sunday night, the furniture store under my friend's apartment burned; a pet dog or two died and a couple firefighters were treated for burns, but the blaze was isolated in the ground floor and most of the damage to the upper floors was from smoke or firefighters busting down doors and out windows. (Not to be confused with the more recent fire I called 911 on, evacuating the kittens while my buddy fought the blaze). A city housing inspector quickly condemned the building and posted a notice promising fines and imprisonment for trespassing, even for residents (the lower floors were scorched and unstable). So we went through the kitchen entrance of the building upstairs, across the neighboring rooftop, and down through the broken fire door, and over the course of a week, retrieved everything valuable from my friend's apartment, including his Dreamcast and a duffel bag I'd left there when I moved to town.

I met N and A at a party for R's birthday at Nublu a couple weeks later. N was an old friend of R's, and A was an old friend of N's who'd just moved to the city, and I quickly became new friends with both. Just thinking about A makes my gut leap in a rush. I could pick out what she wore that night from her closet, tell you everything we said, describe the music we danced to, the way the light played across her cheek; I think you get it, right? Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

N and I, on the other hand, were like sister and brother, and we both loved marine fishing: I, the virtual, she, the actual. We made plans to play Dreamcast together, but those were always disrupted by better plans like attending the opera, or leading a tour over the Brooklyn bridge, or spending the weekend with A and others at N's place on the shore. Over this period, I saw A infrequently (a dance of in-town, out-of-town, busy, not busy) and only discovered my ardor was matched last summer during a long poolside weekend at N's place. God damn you half-Japanese girls; you do it to me every time. Then, as happens, a diminishing of contact, constraints of time and place, and longing becoming a whisper before the bad winter ahead.

Of course, N being like a sister, I shared none of this with her (and neither, it seems, did A), and N and I have continued to meet every month or so, occasionaly with A, usually not. Otherwise, I've isolated myself, exorcising my ghosts, and recently spent a little time making friends with a friend of friends who, it turns out, just wants to be friends; friends are good, right? I think so.

Yesterday I got a call from N, who owns a brand new luxury fishing boat that she and her man are setting up for charter in Cancun. She needs someone to go down with her, this weekend or next, and take pictures of the craft and crew in action, and, knowing my love and knowledge of marine fishing (at least in video version), she asked me. My airfare and hotel will be free, as will my meals and of course all the deep-sea fishing I can handle. Plus, it looks like A will come along. Stomach somersaults already!

How will the bosses here at work like the fact that I'm taking a couple days off with such short notice? Does it really matter? I'd go ahead with it in any case. I'd be stupid not to.

Here we go, Mexico!

This is very loopy and awesome and OMG FISHING IN CANCUN d'awwwww.

Have fun!

Fabulous story.

Lay off the pasta and bag you a mermaid.
So, same girl who whirled you last year, eh?
Cool it with the wedding bells and maybe she'll give you a jingle jangle jingle.

You are livin' the life, mah man.
L-I-V-I-N.

Is the way we fall in love with someone a thing we're born with, or a thing we learn? I've always felt like it wasn't love if it didn't tumble my innards, and I've acted accordingly all along.

Don't I know it. I still remember the giddy, light-headed feeling I got when my high school crush sat down in front of me in math class. The back of his neck was so so smooth, I had to close my eyes sometimes. It was worse in physics class - he sat behind me, so I was hyper-aware of every single movement, any sound. I once caught him smelling my hair, and I almost died.

Strangely, I didn't really have those stomach-ache feelings about Mudd-Dude until after we were dating for a few months. We were friends first, casual make-out partners second, then lovers third.

I just realized that "the kitchen entrance of the building upstairs" makes no sense at all. It should read "the kitchen entrance of the building next door." Perils of writing with half an eye on a giant database query.

And I just found out that my boss thinks it's fine for me to take the time off, this weekend or next, and that he's jealous of my free vacation.