Note: I had never listened to this song before I wrote this. It is ridiculous to be sure, but the lyrics warrant a quick read through understand just how nonsensical the song is.
First impression: this girl is all about office supplies. She tries to explain her love by comparing it to a rubber band, a pencil/eraser combo (double analogy ohmygod), a pencil sharpener, and a ruler. Let me try office supply analogies. My love for this song is like a red crayon. At first I am full, excited, and bright, ready to help create something truly special. Then the love slowly shrinks as time (and this song) goes on until I throw away the final useless nubbin of it without even trying to listen to the last nonsensical minute for fear of brain hemorrhaging.
She begins her exploration of love simply enough: with a comparison to a rubber band. She says it comes and goes and pins her like a trampoline. Aguilera is obviously referring to the new invention of auto-rubber bands. They are equipped with micro-sensors which detect a need for rubber bands. They come and go as the need for them shifts. She also refers to the recently revealed "pinning trampoline." unlike every other trampoline in the world which has the sole purpose of propelling the user as far away from it as possible, this trampoline pins you down until you tap. These are currently mainly used to deter children from the recreational use of the dangerous, non-pinning type of trampoline. This verse serves to convince the reader that she is knowledgeable about new technology, and can, by logical extension, serve as an expert on office supplies, and by further logical extension, on love.
Her love of office supplies is fully expressed in the next verse when she tries to describe her love. She could have gone the traditional way and not used office supplies. But she is a rebel, and a nerd. She starts off simply enough: "If I was a ruler, I'd set you straight." Seeing as rulers are used as straight edges, this seems to make sense. But rulers don't in and of themselves make things straight. They can be used to draw a straight line or used as a guide to judge how straight something is. We can gather from this that she means she would physically straighten him out. We can't be certain, but this may refer to his bad posture or perhaps a broken appendage that needs to be set straight. The second option follows Aguilera's wording more than anything to do with posture, so we can deduce Aguilera's boy has some sort of broken leg, etc. We are not sure if he got this as a result of jumping on the dangerous, non-pinning trampoline from verse 1, but the signs do point to it.
Aguilera goes on to say that the comparison fits "Cause once I'm trying to bounce, you pull me back/And when I try to come to you, you give me slack." The first line makes sense if we are indeed talking about truly elastic love. The second takes some deep intellectualizing. So when she comes back, there is slack. This means that either the love has grown or it is stretched out, deformed almost. Or it could be slack like you'd give your dog on his leash. If you don't trust your dog, there is very little slack. If you do, then you slowly give him some slack to test him. If this is how Aguilera meant it, then she is the dog and is being tested by her owner/boyfriend. This could explain her obsession with inanimate office supplies.
Though an office supply aficionado she is, a grammartarian she is not. She says "the rubber band was an analogy, you can even say it was a metaphor." No. It can't be both. They are different things, so it can't be both. It's plainly not a metaphor, as a metaphor would be something like "our love is a rubber band," or "this song is a steaming pile of doodoo." It could have been an analogy if she had said something like "our love is like a rubberband," or "this song is like a cheetah fart." (it stinks and is totally unexpected).
In her last verse in this ballade-ode to the office supply. she says "If we were gaffer tape maybe we could spend the summer/You could say your piece, you could post it on paper/When your love hits, it sticks me like a stapler." For those not familiar with gaffer tape (including myself until I Googled it), it is a very strong tape, much like duct tape. The advantage to gaffer's tape, though, is that it an be removed without residue. Using this knowledge, w can see that Aguilera wants a summer fling. She does not want their love to be like duct tape, where they become too attached and in the end must remove it quickly to avoid it hurting. Nor does she want Scotch tape, which is flimsy and unreliable in high-pressure situations. She continues along these lines, saying he could write his piece on a post-it. From this we see that the communication between the two is shaky at best. Much like the roommate who leaves passive-aggressive post-its around the apartment, Aguilera wants to avoid both confrontation and real communication. His love-filled post-it will no doubt be crumpled up and thrown away, along with every other blank post-its in the house. Our final detail about this troubled love is that his love hits her like a stapler. As anyone knows who has been accidentally stapled, it is only a minor annoyance. Sure, it stings a little, but nothing that last more than a day. Thus, the love between these two is so inconsequential to her that she says she will not remember it after a few days if she's no reminded by a pastel yellow square.
This song really exemplifies Aguilera's strength. She takes an object and writes a line involving some verb/adjective relating to the object. She then takes another and does the same, twisting words and their pronunciations to make them rhyme. In this case, even though it doesn't really make sense for a song about love to be described by random office supplies, she does it anyway. Not one of her analogies makes sense, especially the main one of a rubber band. Yet she perseveres through this minor setback and makes a song that really gets people talking. Even if it is about whether or not she needs to be taken back to the third grade. Again. There's really not much else to say about this hot mess of garbled analogies and mixed metaphors warped and twisted into 4 minutes of nonsensically rhyming, strained lines, which in the end only leave the listener wondering if Aguilera will end up taking that job offer from Staples.
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