This is for Jennie, who asked.

Taylor's hobbies include: making girls pregnant, having an Ellen DeGeneres haircut, not being self-aware, and Uninformed Republicanism. We continue to love him anyway. (Photo from Flickr, 2008)

When I was in high school, my mother worried that my Weird Thing For Taylor Hanson would keep me from finding a boyfriend.

(She’s reading this now all indignant, like, “I did not,” but she totally did. It’s okay, Mom. I had that worry, too.)

I mean, we’ve talked about my Weird Thing For Taylor Hanson here before. It’s, you know. Weird. It started when I was eleven and even more achingly spastic than I am now, at which point  TayHan lodged his ridiculous, non-threatening, flaxen-haired self in one of the many cracks of my fragile psyche, rearranging all the furniture in there to accommodate his Wurlitzer and many pairs of leather pants. I proceeded to carry the cassette single of “MMMBop” around in the sleeve of my uniform sweatshirt for the rest of sixth grade like a total creeper and chatter shrilly to anyone who would listen about how one of his songs actually mentioned me by name. As anyone who knows me at all can attest, when I love something, I love it VERY MUCH: still, the late nineties were a hysterical kind of dopamine bloodbath alarming even for me. No wonder my mother worried about my prospects.

My Weird Thing For Taylor Hanson did not, in the end, keep me from finding love in the real world. Another thing it didn’t do was go away. Which is why, at nearly twenty-five years of age, gainfully employed, happily attached, I’m going to New York on Thursday to spend a weekend doing Really Embarrassing Hanson Things the details of which, when she heard them, caused my fiftysomething coworker to look at me with something very much like pity and say, “God. You are such a nerd.”

Taylor says: "who is that mysterious woman?" ALSO, I swear my schnoz is not actually that big. (Photo from Sierra, Fall 2008).

When mocked (and there comes a moment in every significant relationship where I have to come out of the Hanson Closet, at which point a certain amount of humiliation inevitably follows) I used to say: “Hanson makes good music!” but you know what? That’s not even true. Hanson makes okay music punctuated by the occasional blazing fireball, the kind of swoony, electric pop miracle that most bands only ever approximate.

That’s a lot to explain, though, and most people don’t want to hear it anyway, so now I say: “Excuse me, there are way more embarrassing things than liking Hanson. For example: those people on Law and Order: SVU who like to get choked while they do the nasty. Those people have something to be embarrassed about.”

Haters to the left, is what I’m getting at.

This is the truth: sometimes I forget I feel things and they remind me.

Sometimes I need to shout and they say, please do.

Sometimes I am standing in a crowd at a concert and I can see but just barely and I have to keep moving and I think, yes, yes, yes. I know.