Most people effortlessly leave all-consuming celebrity crushes behind them some time in high school, if not earlier. The masochistic fun of papering one's walls with images of one's object of devotion begins to cool, and one finds it increasingly unreasonable to invest a total stranger with heroic traits and hottest-in-history status. I am no stranger to arrested development, however, and as such I retain this tendency. Not the wall-papering, but the self-immolating devotion. The crushes come and go, and most embarrass me terribly once they've burned themselves out. I've got a real honey of a hangup right now, have for a year or so, on the dimpled dreamboat the Red Sox have in center field.

The nature of these fixations is such that one doesn't necessarily notice their intensity until it's pointed out to one, just as a fish does not notice it's swimming in water. Why would it, when the water is all it knows? So the fact I had long since crossed into personality-disorder terrain wasn't entirely clear until I attempted to have a conversation, with my significant other of four years, about which style of communist painting would better suit Mr. Damon in portrait form. I want to commission a painting of him Commie-style, with all that stylized glory and glow. But, I mused aloud, expecting a carefully considered reply, do I want it in the Soviet style, with those bold lines and modernist minimalism, or do I want the more rosy-toned Chinese variety, with a cluster of pudgy beaming babies gathered at his feet? This was a conversation I attempted to have.