to tell you the truth, there is no such thing as a normal person. we’re all crazy somehow, just some more capable of it than others. minutes before taking our final test, i chatted with the girl next to me. she had a european accent so i asked where she was from and what brought her to the states. julia virden was german and when she told me why she moved, she had this euphoric look on her face. she looked up at the ceiling then slowly at me, a hint of giddy-ness and nostalgia in her eyes, and replied, "love." simple as that. several years back, while walking around nyc on vacation, she crossed paths with an american boy. with a gleam, she told me it was love at first sight. “it’s crazy, i know,” she kept repeating, still somewhat incredulous. she ended up extending her stay another week; they kept in touch, tried the long-distance thing, had many ups and downs, and finally made the jump to marriage.

it’s hard to say if given the same opportunity, i’d be crazy enough to change my whole life on one chance encounter with someone completely foreign. what i do know is that the get-up of a relationship is tough—but it should make you want to try. to be sure, "love" will make you not want to be yourself. it'll make you walk five hundred miles or learn french. it'll make you write “bad checks.” love screams YES! and you couldn't agree more. but will you do something about it? this is the dividing line that makes love stories, crazy. your intentions with anyone or anything could make the pope weep his eyes dry, but if you don’t do anything about them, what good is that? i can’t appreciate a girl who has a lot of interests yet doesn't have anything to show for it. a girl with a hundred different hobbies or things-she-wants-to-get-into tells me that she'll take up something but when it gets tough or perhaps boring, she'll drop it. for example, i know a lot of girls who want to be the next feist or priscilla ahn, but the moment a guitar needs to be re-strung, suddenly photography becomes a passion of theirs, their flickr site up and ready. there's nothing wrong with being curious and trying out new things–i'm like this myself and i encourage it–but to be able to struggle and work through something is what counts. i don’t know about you but i wouldn’t want to end up like the pile of rachael ray cook books she hasn’t gotten to yet or her half-made scarf still in its crochet.

julia was twenty-six at the time of our conversation, he was twenty-nine, and she claimed their relationship was never stronger. it took them seven long years to figure out if things could work, even with that first, miracle-sparking glance. stories like theirs exist but it’s only because they were crazy enough to keep trying. einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. i don’t know a single person who isn’t insane to a degree (if they weren’t, they’d be some sort of machine-man like the terminator, then we’d be in trouble), which in some weird way, gives me some hope about the possibility of more love stories that defy circumstance. i mean, c’mon, normal is just plain boring. why have an eight-pack of crayons when you can try for the one hundred twenty-one? maybe i’m just ambitious. or maybe it’s because i want passionate, make-you-sweat…bed-time storytelling. whatever the case is, in the end, i want to be able to say that i at least tried.

but then again, i could really be crazy.