Miley

When you live in Montana and don't snowboard or ski, your options in the winter are pretty limited. You spend weeks perfecting pomegranate-infused tequila. You comment on sports blogs. You get good at things that have no practical value. Let me put it this way: If anyone wants to throw down at Tecmo Super Bowl, I am more than ready.

You watch a lot of TV. If the cable company fucks up and gives you the wrong channels in your basic package, you watch a lot of Oxygen, Bravo, and TV Guide. So for a few months last year, for the first and only time, I was in tune with celebrity gossip.

Celebrity gossip is one of those things like instant messaging or heroin: you might fool yourself into thinking you're immune to its charms, but the truth is, if you try it you're going to get hooked, so maybe it is best just to stay away.

And that was how I witnessed the birth of Miley Cyrus. It was as though one day, every media outlet in the country decided that Miley Cyrus needed to be a star, and they were going to make it happen right away. She was in every news break. She was the first one interviewed on every red carpet. Every infallibly bland word she spoke in public was replayed and meticulously pored over.

And blandness, or more precisely mediocrity, came to define her. She was a passable singer, but her voice was really nothing special. She was cute, but not psychotically beautiful like say a Jessica Alba. She seemed sensible, but not threateningly bright. Paradoxically, this mediocrity was exactly what singled her out as the most attention-worthy teenager in the country. With a few voice lessons and a makeover, you could be Miley Cyrus (or so it feels). That made her relatable, especially to her own age group. She was the perfect everytween.

I took a psychology class where I learned about a study that showed that the most popular students in graduate school housing were the ones who lived closest to the stairwells. In other words, the more you see someone, the more you like her. The more I saw her on TV, the more I started to like Miley Cyrus.

Yeah, I have "See You Again" on my iPod. Want to fight?

The strange thing about the song is that it seems to have two singers, not one. There's the sexy, self-assured vixen of the verses ("I've got a way of knowing when something is right. /I feel like I must have known you in another life."). And then there's the prudish spaz of the chorus.

The last time I freaked out,
I just kept looking down,
I st-st-stuttered when you asked me what I'm thinking about
And like I couldn't breathe,
You asked what's wrong with me,
My best friend Lesley said, "Oh, she's just being Miley."

That's the line that really hooked me on the song, the part about just being Miley. What the hell does Lesley mean by that anyway? If stuttering and hyperventilating is "just being" you, that doesn't reflect too well on you. Miley, if you're reading this, listen to me: that Lesley girl isn't your friend. A real friend would have said "she had a bad shroom" or "she's epileptic." She wouldn't have seized on a bad moment to sum you up as a lame-oid. In fact, it sounds to me like Lesley is trying to horn in on your boy.

About the song's duality, you could write it off as the inevitable confusion of song production by committee. But if you give it a chance, the song tells a coherent and compelling psychological story. The Miley of the verses is a fantasy self, the person she would like to be. The Miley of the chorus is who she really is when it comes down to it. The song is about reliving the embarrassment of being her imperfect self and psyching herself up so that next time she can act a little bit more like the person she'd like to be.

Teenage girls can relate to that and so can everyone else. If you can't respect that, your whole perspective is whack.