The Crush: The Fiery Allure of the Jolted Puppet

As an adolescent, I could mark time by the incessant epistemes of crushes I had experienced as I careened through junior high school, and beyond. Only a very small percentage of these emo-tional junkets were actualized as relationships, and most were only a subject of extreme embarrassment at the erotic obsession with an entirely inappropriate, or horrifyingly inexplicable, and thankfully, unsuspecting subject. The whole phenomenon of the crush puzzled me as it was always completely out of my control and never fully explained, except for a “wink-wink” moment in the special girls-only classes on menstruation and “love” that were de rigeur for young schoolgirls of the 1960s. But using the very particular apparatus of object-oriented ontology and its ex-cellent mechanism of “allure,” I feel I can perhaps abolish some of the mysterious shame of my youth, and explain its periodic persistence. It is these ephemeral, inexplicable phenomena that are such excellent subjects for this speculative realistic mecha-nism: those things in the existence of subjects that defy all rea-sonable explanation.