Does anyone else see what I'm seeing?

I've been struggling with something all day today: I can't tell if I'm getting old or if Lady Gaga is just weird as shit. I don't get her. I remember when I used to watch the VMAs in middle school and my mom would happen to catch a few minutes of someone's "outrageous" performance and ask me, "Why are they wearing that? Why are they so weird?". I would roll my eyes, let out a huge sigh and come up with some explanation of why whatever it was they were wearing or doing was cool. She would always follow up with, "I don't get it... I guess I'm just old." To this day I still have no answers for her and I don't think anyone will have any answers for me about Lady Gagmewithaspoon but it's worth a shot.

When you're younger, especially in the formative years of middle school when not watching the VMAs is social suicide, you go with the flow. Whatever MTV is putting out into the airwaves is automatically cool, hip and trendy and you don't ask questions. Well now I'm asking questions.

I did not watch the VMAs in it's entirety. I have far better things to do like watch a show where a human dates a vampire and some dude can shape shift and kill gods that come into their town and do crazy shit. (My 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Bakke, is slamming her head against the chalkboard for that run on sentence. I don't care and this is my blog and she doesn't read it anyway!) After checking Twitter, I noticed that a lot of people were talking about that crazy gay fish Kanye so of course I had to check it out.

When I tuned in, this is the first thing I saw:

No wonder people can't read her poker face- it's covered in a creepy mask. She looks like a cross between a burn victim and a human Slim Jim.

Later she does her performance in a semi-normal costume (normal by MTV standards at least). Everything seems to be going fine; just a little weird but I try to keep an open mind and try to understand that she is in some way, in someone's mind cool, hip and trendy. At this point, I think Perez Hilton is the only one who thinks so. I am successful at keeping an open mind until one of her "dancers" rolls up in a bejeweled wheelchair. After I stop laughing hysterically I ask, "what the f*ck?" but no one has answers for me. From there it just keeps going downhill.

During her performance she sits down to "play" a huge white piano... with her leg hiked up onto the keys. A true "lady" would never sit like that. Once she stands up, she starts to bleed everywhere. As in blood. I ask again, "what the f*ck?". Still no answers.

Here's the kicker: at the end of her performance, while she's still bleeding, she hangs from a rope. She looks like a freaking used tampon.

Is there something I'm not getting about how cool she is? Am I really getting old? I just don't see how anyone, not even a middle schooler, could sit there and tell me that this tampon's twin is cool. Her final costume change of the night leaves her looking like an eskimo/bird's nest and leaves me more confused than ever. If you have any answers for me, PLEASE feel free to share.