Whenever the light shines on my once pure white bedroom walls, I think about how tacky they look with old sticky tape marks blotched all over them.

Those tape marks once held mega-sized posters of top-chart celebrities anywhere from Hilary Duff, to the Jonas Brothers, to—yes, I’ll admit it—Twilight characters. I was one of those teenyboppers: the kind who throw away their individuality just to be another obsessive pop fan.

Maybe it was easy to get caught up in, or maybe it was just the “thing” to do, but according to an Oracle-conducted survey of 141 students, having a celebrity obsession strikes 58 percent of them as pretty strange.

“People should focus on themselves,” junior Mike McCarthy said.

Included in that 58 percent is senior Maureen Maginot. Although Maginot is fan of Jennifer Aniston and claims to have a case of “Bieber Fever,” she cannot find the reasoning behind why celebrities are highly idolized.

“People are obsessed with people they haven’t actually met,” Maginot explained.

Many South students have also noted that there is a big difference between being a fan and having an obsession.

But where exactly does the line lie? What turns an ordinary celebrity fan into an obsessed “I sleep with a picture of them taped to my pillow” fanatic? Does it fall somewhere between the number of posters they hang up, or the amount of times they check their favorite celeb’s twitter page?

Most South students admit to having taken an interest in celebrities between the ages of five to thirteen. I also admit that at nine years old, I was dancing in front of the TV to the latest Britney Spears music video. Now looking back at it, I can’t possibly wrap my mind around how that seems the least bit healthy.

Because most of us were too young to understand any of the explicit content portrayed, those celebrities were our idols and still very much a part of who we wanted to be.

No offense to Britney, but it didn’t matter if she wore skin-tight clothing or had sexual references sprinkled through her songs. She was still the hottest topic that so many little girls and boys looked up to…and she was not the only one. Her face, along with other pop stars, were plastered over every school lunch bag, backpack, magazine cover and commercial around. So what choice did we have to ignore them?

For decades the media has sold these celebrities to their targeted age group in every possible way. Is it just a coincidence that the 114 Oracle-surveyed South students were in that targeted age group?

This must mean the media is choosing our role models for us.  You don’t see people like President Obama with his own fragrance and clothing line.

The problem isn’t always how much involved people are with their celebrities, but it is more so with whom they’re choosing to involve themselves. In the end, if you’re going to suffer from blotchy tape marks all over your walls, make sure the person up there is well worth it.