i can't help loving her...

I would have to admit that from the very first time I heard "Genie in a Bottle" years ago while sitting on the floor in my dorm room loathing Manchurian history, I have loved Christina Aguilera.

It's been an abiding love, changing with the seasons, with her weight, hair color, predisposition to outfits that cut off circulation in areas she might want to keep someday and look like they were made out of electrical tape and pvc, but ultimately: never wavering.

I'm the girl at the stop light with her windows down, belting some song out at the top of her lungs, looking like a crazed mall rat, oblivious to the light changing in front of me. And that song I'm singing along with (because I always wanna know when I catch someone doing the same thing: "what are you listening to?????") is probably a Christina tune.

Probably (well, there was a decently hard-core diversion when I decided I wanted to move to Nashville and marry Brad Paisley and songs like "Sleepin on the Foldout" were the meat and potatoes of my musical diet (and interestingly, if I can insert parenthesis within parenthesis (a bad habit of mine) he ended up marrying Kimberly Williams, an actress that I've always drawn comparisons to...funny how that works, I knew my gut was right!), a diversion that also involved a fake Stetson and a big belt buckle and, yes, Wranglers...my my).

I buy tickets to her arena shows (and survived the sea of high-school girls in vinyl pants and halter tops back in the earlier days), and - this is one I shouldn't admit - have a litany of Christina fansites added to my favorites. You know, the really stalker-esque ones that have thousands of pictures of her about town, dining with her family, doing her hair, exiting clubs, bowling, plucking her eyebrows, shopping for shoes, drinking Starbucks, tripping over cracks in the sidewalk - THOSE kids of sites. And I check in with my Christina from time to time, make sure she's still lookin alright, that she and the hubby seem happy, that she still favors GIANT handbags and slingbacks (er...it's not ME taking those stalker-photos, I promise...)

At any rate: yep, I've pre-ordered her cd (personally rather excited about attempt at a cross-genre/cross-generational sound), but basically, this is meant as more of an idol-worship post than anything even vaguely related to actual MUSIC. When she wasted away during her first headlining tour, I defended the fact that anyone dancing for two hours a night on a 90-city tour would drop pounds. When she gained weight and looked perpetually greasy during her tour with Justin Timberlake, I defended her "changing hormones" (hey, that's the excuse she gave!), when she tried a little tooooo hard to be Marilyn Monroe, I defended her right to idolize whomever the heck she wanted - hey, who's to say she couldn't take things a little too far...after all of those hair colors she went through leading up to that point, what else COULD she do with that fried mess but chop it off and curl it up?

Love Christina. Love that she went from Britney-Knock-Off to legitimate pop-princess, to scrawny Latin-wannabe to dirrrrrty, sex-crazed stringy-haired eyeliner fiend to demure and vintage and pencil-skirt addicted.

Love 'er.