Recently, I was struck by a few burning questions: What happens when terrible things happen to celebrities? What about great things? Perhaps more importantly: How do these terrible and great things affect us non-celebrity people?

These questions did not come on suddenly. Here’s what happened. About a week ago, I woke up jet-lagged from a quick Spring Break jaunt to Paris and checked Facebook. I saw that Sarah Michelle Gellar was upset. I saw a meme in which Barack Obama struggled with Crimea.

Then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. It was a photograph of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian cuddling up for Annie Leibovitz. It was on the cover of Vogue. In the picture, Kanye hovers behind Kim, head bowed and eyes half closed. Kim stands before him in a wedding dress, her fifteen-carat engagement ring front and center. I froze. I stared at the picture for a long while. Was I dreaming? I was not.

I got up. I went to Wild Oats. I called my mom.

“Your Kardashian’s finally made it to Vogue, honey,” she said on the line.

“Thanks for the heads up, Mom,” I said. “But just for the record they’re not really my Kardashians.”

But then I gave this some thought. Was she right? Wasn’t Kim as much mine as anyone else’s? Kim has made her dreams, successes, and failures so public that they seem to be all of our dreams, successes, and failures. So maybe Kim was mine, meaning that Vogue cover and fifteen-carat engagement ring were mine as well.

The thought brightened the rest of my Sunday. I walked back to campus. I started my week. Then another amazing thing happened. On Tuesday, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she and Chris Martin were “consciously uncoupling.” 

I applied my mom’s logic. Did this mean that Gwyneth and Chris’ break-up was my break-up as well? I kind of hoped not.

 I did some research, consisting predominantly of me reading Kanye’s tweets. Since the Kimye Vogue cover went public, Kanye had tweeted three times. The first was a simple thank you. The second read: “Dreams do come true,” with a photo from the spread attached. The third was similar. Kanye tweeted, “I love my family,” attaching a photo of him, Kim, and little North West lying seductively on a couch.

The tweets only added to my questions. For instance, how are we supposed to know what to do when celebrities’ dreams come true when we don’t even know what to do when our own dreams come true? Should we all just tweet about it? Is it possible for a baby to pose seductively with its parents? Is that weird?

I decided these last two queries were the easiest to answer. If you are Kimye, your baby can pose seductively. And it is very weird. The others proved more difficult.

We live in a world—at least those of us do who obsessively read all the gossip about Kim and Kanye, Gwyneth and Chris—where the successes and failures of celebrities can effect us as forcefully as those of a good friend. People will weep for Gwyneth and cheer for Kimye. No one really cares about Chris at this point, so not much will happen.

I wonder about the effect this has on us. Does caring about more people make us better, even if these people are celebrities we’ve never met? Or does this faux-caring dull what we feel for the people we actually care about? I still don’t know. I guess I’ll have to read Kimye’s spread in Vogue to possibly find out. Kanye usually does have damn good advice.