let's talk about TAYLOR SWIFT.

mom, t, and i left at around 12 p.m. on saturday and headed up to the wrentham outlets to do a bit of shopping before the taylor swift concert at gillette stadium, which is supposedly only ten minutes or so away from the outlets. while we were there, we passed by quite a few justin bieber fans and i chuckled to myself because they crack me up, wearing his 12-year-old face on their t-shirts. i personally am not a big fan of band t-shirts with faces on them, especially if it's justin bieber's. but anyway. it wasn't until i saw a group of girls wearing home-made shirts that read "justin bieber loves taylor swift" did i think anything of the excessive bieber-ness going on at the outlets..

to make a long story short, i googled (on my mom's phone, because mine doesn't do anything but text message and take poor-quality photos) and discovered that, in addition to gloriana, kellie pickler, and t. swift, justin bieber was also playing at gillette stadium. i'm not sure why i wasn't aware of this fact beforehand, especially since i made a point to see how was opening for her on friday. but whatever.

we finished up our shopping and ate dinner at the uno chicago grill right next door because it has been too long since we've been able to engorge ourselves with their deep dish sundae. you know the one. with the chocolate chip cookie, ice cream, and whip cream? mhm. that's what i'm talking about. from there, we headed over the the stadium. you know, the one that's only ten minutes away? well, with the insane amount of t. swift- and bieber-loving fan traffic, it took us two hours to get there. TWO. HOURS.

we completely missed gloriana, caught the end of kellie pickler as we were walking in, and sat down just in time for justin bieber to take the stage.

(side note: whenever i tell people that justin bieber also played that night, they always give me this horrified look and say, "ohh no." hahah.)

as a first-hand witness of "bieber fever," i can tell you it is pure madness. i can't even begin to describe how obsessed and high-pitched these girls are. he pulled one of them, who was wearing his face on her shirt, onto the stage with him and he sang to her and held her hand, and i was pretty sure she was going to faint. (though she did not.) but there's no doubt in my mind that girl counts saturday as the best day of her life thus far. meanwhile, every other girl with bieber fever who was not on that stage was like, "UGH that is so unfair!"

and then there was t: "i don't have bieber fever. i got that vaccine." (in case you couldn't already tell, i am bieber fever-less as well.) although, i've heard comments where people (like john mayer, for example) have said, all kidding aside, once you see him perform, you'll be blown away by his talent. but even after seeing him live, i'm still not impressed. t says i can't really judge it by his performance on saturday night because the sound quality wasn't that great. but even with the poor sound taken into account, he wasn't that good.

however, i must say that if i was 12 years old, i'd probably be in love with justin bieber too. fortunately, i am not.

while we waited for taylor's crew to set things up for her, we did the wave. i've never seen it done with more than four people before, and it is just the coolest thing. i tried to get a video of it, but my camera is ancient and has the worst picture and video quality ever. here's my attempt. can you see it? it gets a bit pixilated at the end.

it also started to rain a few drops and everyone whipped out their ponchos, but by the time they put them on it had already stopped raining. t and i just watched them all and wondered, who even has ponchos ? we were just prepared with towels waiting for us in the car if we got wet.

anyway.

finally, after a lot of excessive, false-alarm screaming, taylor swift came out on stage and put on the most amazing show. i took a few pictures, but combine the distance we were from the stage with the aforementioned poor picture quality of my camera, and they all turn out something like this:

actually, that was probably the best picture i got. the rest are much worse, and all you can see are blurbs of light. i also took some videos, but everyone sang along so loudly that you can barely hear her over top of them, so i won't post those.

but even though i don't have any solid proof, it was seriously an amazing show. it was her last show of the fearless tour, and i'm pretty sure it was the biggest, with 55,000 fans. she paused to look around a few times, probably trying to take it all in (although i doubt that's even possible to do), and she cried each time. can you imagine what that must be like for her? to hear that many people screaming for her, and singing her lyrics back to her - the lyrics she wrote on her bedroom floor, back in high school, when her friends were being mean to her? i can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.

she had a few videos play in between songs, one of which was about the effect her songs have on the boys she writes about. love and theft were on there, talking about her song, 'hey stephen' (which i mentioned was written about stephen from love and theft) and tim mcgraw was on there as well, obviously talking about her song, 'tim mcgraw.'

during her songs, she had different things going on on stage. like dancers during 'love story,' a library bookshelf backdrop for 'teardrops on my guitar,' flames behind 'picture to burn,' etc. it was all very creative and well-put together. i loved it. and then she sang 'today was a fairytale,' and a picture of her with taylor lautner came up. you should've heard the fan's reaction to that.

it was over all too soon, in my opinion, but it was totally worth all the traffic we sat in. and let me tell you, we sat in another two hours of traffic just to get out of the stadium after it was over. literally. add two more hours of travel time to get us back to ct, and we didn't get home until 3 a.m.

yeah. it was a good night. /morning.