I Love Weird Al Yankovic and I'm not afraid to admit it. I am a dork.

I uploaded all of my old Weird Al Yankovic albums onto my ipod and I am dorking out right now, listening to classics such as "I Love Rocky Road," "My Bologna," and "Like a Surgeon." Weird Al makes me so happy. I'm not afraid to admit it. When I was a kid, Weird Al was all I listened to.

Okay, I was really vague just now with the whole "when I was a kid" thing, implying that I'm talking about my elementary school years, but I pretty much only listened to Weird Al through junior high school too.

I remember the first few times I hung out with my stepgrandmother Joanne (or Granny Joanny, as we like to call her) (calling her "granny" is funny because she's really young) (like, my mom's age, or thereabouts)--this was before she was my granny, this was when she and my grandfather were still dating--Joanne and I would talk about music, and she was really hip and listened to people like Madonna and Michael Jackson (this was back when he was hip and good), and I wanted her to think I was hip too, so I pretended that I knew all of the bands that she was talking about, but in reality I pretty much only knew Weird Al. (I was such a dork that I didn't even honestly know the songs that Weird Al was spoofing) (when I finally started listening to other music, I can't even tell you how many "ah ha!" moments I had when I'd be like: Oh, it's really I Love Rock'n'Roll! And wow, it's My Sharona! And ha, Like a Virgin!) (I still can't listen to a lot of those songs without mumbling under my breath the Weird Al lyrics) (which my brain thinks of as the "real" lyrics to all of those songs)

And then I remember going to a party at the beginning of my freshman year of high school at my friend Lanie's house, and she put on the first Violent Femmes album and it was like a religious experience because (a) the album was amazing and (b) I'd finally grown out of Weird Al.

But I never really grew out of Weird Al. I just pushed him over to another part of my brain so that I could start taking in all of the music that I had been ignoring. (And now I can actually have real conversations with Granny J about Nirvana, Outkast, or whatever.) But sometimes, that part of my brain where my love for Weird Al lives, that part of my brain needs to be fed, and so, tonight, I'm taking him in.

As Weird Al would sing: "Never gonna stop, eat it up, such a tasty snack, I always eat too much, and throw up, but I'll soon be back, for my, my, my bologna."

(Obviously, bologna is a metaphor for Weird Al in the above quote.)