Conversion

"There are two types of people in this world. Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don't. My ex-wife loves him."

- What About Bob

I have resisted. I have stood firm. I refused to jump on the bandwagon. When I learned friends of mine had succumbed to the saccharine music and squinty eyes of the evil one, I shook my head sadly and mentally crossed their name off of my future intellectual-only gatherings. I firmly believed, in my heart, that this was the great divide of our time:

Behold! Taylor Swift. Beware, my friends. I am one of you no longer, for I have succumbed. I now am forced to admit the truth: I kind of don't completely despise Taylor Swift. I would go so far as to say I no longer long to puncture my eardrums with my cuticle scraper when I hear her voice. In fact, you could even say that the thought of being on the same planet as her no longer fills my heart with a dread previously reserved for discovering a scorpion in my shoe.

She's not so bad.

Taylor Swift engaged in a stealthy, calculated strategy to bring me to her side:

1. She began writing songs and singing them and recording them and became famous. Initially, I was unimpressed with Taylor Swift because her voice sounds like she's singing through an oscillating fan and her songs are lame and predictable. (But she wrote them when she was 15, so it's okay for them to be lame and predictable.) But, hey...some of them are catchy. I found myself nodding involuntarily when I heard one once.

2. She made "country" music that was close enough to pop music to "cross over" to VH1, where I receive most of my current music education. Again, at one point during the video for "Love Story," I may have, without cognition, tapped a toe.

3. She was humiliated by Kanye West. As Katy Perry so aptly tweeted, "It's like u stepped on a kitten."

4. She hosted SNL. This was the final straw that broke the bull on the horns of the pot I was watching but it never boiled. I cannot resist an unexpectedly successful SNL host, no matter what. If Kim Kardashian hosted SNL and was hilarious, I would become her biggest fan. If Rush Limbaugh hosted SNL... no, I can't go there. But I will say that the only reason I ever FOR A MOMENT considered voting for John McCain was because he was an awesome SNL host.

This season of SNL has been dreadful. Really, really awful. Then, the magical talented young skinny rich probably fresh-smelling Taylor Swift shows up, and knocks it out of the park. There was not a single dud in the whole night. Some were better than others, but nearly every sketch got at least a chuckle out of me, and she was in just about everything. Check out her monlogue:

And then this one, a public service announcement:

But this is the one that was closest to my heart:

Resistance was futile.