And then one day it didn’t. After much buying of bamboo toothbrushes and refusing of straws, I decided that it was okay for me to like things, to give in to the bubbly, butterflies-dancing-in-your-tummy euphoria of stumbling upon a beautiful object. Because a crush on a thing is so much more than a sum of its cotton or metal or (heaven help us) plastic parts. Like our crushes on people, our crushes on stuff are sometimes more about who we would like to be than what the thing itself actually is. My endless (and likely forever unrequited, due to the $$$) crush on a Celine box bag is mostly about how it symbolizes the sort of woman I’d like to become (polished, elegant, summers in the South of France) than the stunning simplicity of its spare gold hardware and smooth leather. Crushes are a distraction from the tedium of the everyday (probably why I spend hours on transit zooming in on pictures of the “ Directional Ring ” on Erica Weiner’s website, studying its moody blue sapphire like I’m a gemologist). They’re also just good fun, like the Kule “Jilly” sweater in jaunty red and lilac that's currently sitting open in the browser tab next to this one. In a world where every refresh of Twitter brings fresh horror, and things feel both permanently terrible and moving-too-fast to absorb, distractions like these are welcome — and necessary.