There’s been some grumbling about Taylor Swift’s sweep at the Grammy’s, and if you’d never heard any of her music before last night, you were probably wondering, “Who’s the off-key high schooler singing with Stevie Nicks?”

But I kind of like her. I know it’s trendier to prefer the avant-garde Lady Gaga over the vanilla teenager who writes songs in her bedroom - and you could definitely argue that Lady Gaga has stronger vocals and a more powerful onstage presence - but Taylor Swift taps into an inner adolescent part of me that rouses nostalgia somethin’ fierce.

I hadn’t bothered giving the rest of her music a listen (outside of the stuff that plays on Top 40 radio) until this morning, so I was pretty much Team Gaga until about three hours ago. Then I listened to one song, and then another, and then another. Who knew that a teenybopper ballad like “I’d Lie” would get me the tiniest bit choked up?

And suddenly I found myself experiencing some long-lost pang of yearning, the kind of yearning you only feel when you’re a high school freshman and everything is new and the future is perfect and your entire existence looks like, well, a Taylor Swift music video - at least in your head. You’re yearning for a boy, a feeling, an experience that’s been promised to you in Sweet Valley High novels and “7th Heaven” episodes, and that’s all you ever daydream about on weekends as you ride alone in the backseat of your parents ‘86 Dodge Caravan on the way to Woodfield Mall to shop for new sweaters.

At least until I remembered that this was not at all how high school turned out to be. I was mostly bored and fidgety, spending Friday nights at home studying for AP exams and Saturday afternoons watching my boyfriend play video games, feeling angsty at everybody and everything and thinking that I couldn’t graduate soon enough. I went to college under the impression that I’d missed out on the quintessential high school experience (especially after I took the ACTs or APs or something at a private school in the suburbs that looked like everything I thought a high school should look like). I got suckered in to the whitebread American High School Dream, and left incredibly disappointed at the lack of teen drama and romance I’d been led to expect.

But I think there’s something to be said for the fact that “Fifteen” manages to evoke falsified memories from someone who used to be an awkward, angry little Asian girl at a Chicago public high school. It’s a surprisingly powerful piece of escapism that runs in the same vein of “Twilight” (which unwittingly sucked me in about a month ago, underlying messages be damned), a reminder of a time when things seemed a lot simpler and less bogged down in the doldrums of adult responsibility. It’s nice.

I’ve been relishing in the yen of adolescence all afternoon now, not thinking about anything in particular, just feeling what I used to feel when I’d listen to the radio in the backseat of my parents’ car and daydream an elaborate fantasy about charming, shaggy-haired boys and school dances and giggly girlfriends trying on dresses at the mall.

So I kind of get it. The whole Taylor Swift thing. And as much as I like Lady Gaga, “Poker Face” never quite elicited the same emotional reaction that jostled me down memory lane this morning.