I am, once again, twitterpated.  No, I'm not talking about twitter, facebook or any other social media, I'm referring to that "butterflies in the stomach", almost can't sleep, stammer your sentences kind of twitterpated.  True first love, puppy love, yearning love with all the angst and rollercoaster highs and lows.  And it's with my job.

Yes, the saying, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is very true for me, probably too true for the health of my bank account.  I have taken the saying too literally, according to my more responsible friends and family, but at least living in a ski town, I know I have lots and lots of company.  In fact, I saw an interesting craigslist post recently that listed all of the things the person was willing to do to earn a wage in his ski town home:  manual labor, walk dog, pick up after dog, clean the oven, change the litter box (okay, those last two were examples from my own "to do" list at home, but you get the gist).  The kicker was in small print at the end of the ad: I have a degree in Finance.

This might not be an advertisement that you would see in a non-resort area.  Talk to your average local on the chairlift, and within the duct-taped patched coat, scruffy beard and rasta patterned hat, you might find a nuclear physicist.  Really.

We're here because we love it, usually.  We are so blindly in love that we value our gear more than our college degrees.  Love that transcends common sense and tells us that we're smart enough that despite our resumes, we know that getting to do what we love, where we love to do it is the highest honor.  It's too hard to make it here unless we have some crazy, possibly co-dependently unhealthy, sicko love/lust relationship with the resort mountain environment.  And that kind of crazy love?  It has clearly infected me again this time of the year.  It shows.

I shake, I babble, I stutter.  I grin.  I get star-struck and shy when I see the world-cup racers in town to train.  I gawk at the cool graphics on the ski-rep suburus, trucks, and vans-and have you seen that K2 RV?!  OMG!  I'm a teenager again.  I greet returning ski instructor friends I haven't seen the whole summer like they are my favorite long lost relatives.  I even enjoyed getting the ski helmet I am required to wear for the first time in my career.  Granted, I still think I look like a dork in it, but it's one step closer to my first day back on snow....and teaching. 

I like a great day skiing with friends, a powder day in the bumps, a solo slide on a slope as much as any skier.  But my crush is with my career.  I absolutely love to teach skiing.  At this point in my life, I would rather spend the majority of my ski time with ski school students than freeskiing every single day of the season. 

Corny, yes.  True, yes.  I know that there are many people who think it's blasphemous to say that if I won the lottery, I wouldn't ski on my own every single day, that I'd probably continue to be a ski instructor.  It's this kind of non-logical love that keeps me in the socio-economic level I'm in (more than broke, mostly), and from actually buying a lottery ticket-don't need one.  I am clearly in love.

I still get a rush of adrenaline from my sport on a regular basis, and it frequently involves something within ski school.  The good, the bad, the ugly; I get it all during the course of my job, and I still pace the floor before each lesson:  Do they still love me?  Will they still want me?  Will they call me?

And like a lot of summer camp-type romances, in a couple of months from now I'll find myself wistfully looking at other areas; the ones without the snow, the ones without the high cost of living, maybe even areas with "real jobs".  And my infatuation will wane.  I'll start to move beyond the school-yard affection...at least temporarily.  True to my fickle nature, by spring, it will be a love/hate relationship.  By season's end, I'll wonder if I can even do it for one more year. 

Shivering through early spring camping trips will give way to sandals and shorts, and some days it will be so hot that it will be hard to imagine how many layers it took last winter just to go outside.  That's about the time I start getting antsy.  Looking for something more.  Noticing when the new ski magazines come out, usually as pre-maturely as holiday decorations at Wal Mart. 

I also fidget, frequently tapping my foot while I count down the days (and bank account dollars) until the first ski lesson of the year.  That's what Thumper did in "Bambi", remember?  And that's the movie where we learned what it feels like to be twitterpated.  My first-blush love shows up again, and I realize I still have feelings for it.  In the movie "Bambi", Friend Owl said, "You begin to get weak in the knees. Your head's in a whirl. And then you feel light as a feather, and before you know it, you're walking on air. And then you know what? You're knocked for a loop, and you completely lose your head!"

I know that feeling so very intimately, and the day I don't feel it prior to the start of another season of teaching skiing?  Well I guess that's the day I'll buy that lottery ticket.