Taunting Craigslist Missed Connections

I am no stranger to Craigslist. I have successfully negotiated the purchase of electronic equipment — not stolen — and did not die in the process. I have also found two roommates in this manner and neither killed me in my sleep (though one roommate's cousin did, I believe, want to partake in some late-night funny business with my handsome sleeping cherubic self).

Craigslist is also where I go to not find work. The job boards are criminally depressing, time-and-self-worth suckholes that bog me down in mire and shame and depression. Eyes glaze over, sexual appetite wilts, brain liquefies, body becoming a gelatinous goo of worthlessness, I am a Madam Toussaud's wax figure of myself under a McDonald's heatlamp, and if only I had a little more fry-o-lator experience, I could get that job at McDonald's.

There is one place on Craigslist, however, that does not disappoint: Missed Connections. Eyes search for daddy issues and latent low self-esteem with pinpoint accuracy, sexual appetite becomes voracious (easy prey, I'm perverted, etc.), brain is sharp, body feels muscular as everyone else seems so weak, I am AWESOME. (By comparison.) I could be president! And what a tyrant I would be!

I never respond to these posts, primarily because the sad/shy/chubby girl in question is never talking about me. And then I cry. Also, because, would you respond? Do you really want to meet up with somebody who was too scared/lame to talk to you the first time around, but now armed with their stairway wit they go on to Missed Connections to reach you? And, on top of that, not only are YOU so lame that you're reading Missed Connections, but you stumble across one and have so little in the way of social obligations that you'll respond, maybe even go on a date based on an email sent to an anonymous reply-to e-mail address?

Who cares. Check out what I found the other day:

In case you are blind and reading this on your braille computer (or it's reading it for you, I guess is probably more likely) here is the text:

when i saw you behind the mcdonalds counter on broadway..... my heart dipped into what seemed like a melting sundae. your hair color reminded me of the hot fudge as i was letting the spoon graze my sun soaked lips. everytime i see a mcdonalds commercial, i envision me sitting on your face as you yell im loving it. i wanna say it was the hot weather that made me so wet but then id be lying. as i watched you stack the cups into size order, i pictured you licking the sweat from the pores of my body. i hope you don't have your sexual education certificate because i'm about to certify the shit out of you. 

For the first time ever, I felt compelled to respond. No, I HAD to respond. First of all, who was this hussie not only swimming in my infinite pool of personal sadness (that helps me cope with the "success" of working about 8 days a month), but also peeing in it, degrading the true missed connections with the blatant mockery? Second of all, this is pretty funny, and one good turn deserves another. So I signed in to Gmail with my Tuesdays With Maury e-mail address and banged out the following letter from my phone, since my computer has been down for days: *Ahem*

I knew it was going to be a scorcher today, that's why I set my company issued visor at a lusty tilt. You've got Golden Arches, girl, and I ain't talkin' bout dat ass, though it's a stunna: Naw, I'm a foot man. And even though your tight tourist figure came struttin' up to the counter wearing some crusty Rainbow flip flops, I knew dem feet was the apple pie to my value meal. You know how they invented that spoon that also makes the McFlurry? The same magic put me on this earth to caress those toes of yours. I'm gonna dip em in all the sauces, even mixtures you haven't even fathomed. You're the one who's gonna get an education.

You saw me stack those cups, huh? You see how gentle I was with the supersize? Yeah, you gotta finesse the big ones in.

Also, just looked at the e-mail to get the text of the letter. Realized that I must have registered that "anonymous" Maury account under my real name.

I stand by my words.

Sadly, however, it is I that missed the connection. I haven't heard back from my lusty wench of both McDonald's and cyberspace. Here I thought I was gonna have this like Sleepless in Seattle (or You've Got Mail? I didn't see either) Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan fake internet romance based on the most important factors in any relationship: Humor, Sarcasm, Sex and Junk Food.

And I still kinda need a job.

Smells Like Tween Spirit

It all started on Monday. I bought a rug for my bedroom as somewhere nice for my feet to fall when I step out of bed. Martina Van Buren, my lionhead rabbit/devil's advocate/beloved roommate/perpetual antagonist/~8-year-life-partner, took to the rug immediately by pancake-ing herself down, stretching into lounge mode and laying down a few "this is my rug now" poos.

It's like diss:

clearly i am not in control of this situation

And like dat:

The thing is, she has her own rug in her pen. It's a $5.99 dollar store treasure, and she seems to be confusing my rug for hers when I thought that I had clearly indicated the difference. I need to show I'm boss. But if I retaliate in a way she'll understand — by pooping on her rug, for instance — I still lose, because she will just stonewall me into cleaning up the mess myself. She's very persuasive. So I don't have a solution yet.

But as the week progressed, things got weirder than the battle over rug ownership. She was racing in circles around my feet, honking at me like a little goose baby and demanding constant an immediate attention. Wherever I went, she followed, circling my feet and standing on her hind legs to stare at me. At first cute, last night the behavior became insane.

Martina would not leave me alone. Usually when I am working in my lounge chair, she will leap into my lap and sit for a few minutes, and I will move my laptop, put my work on hold and torture her with love and affection. Then she'll get restless and hop down, go eat some hay or my shoes or a wire or plot my untimely death or whatever it is that she does when I'm not looking. But not last night: She hopped into my lap probably ten times over the course of a couple hours and just stayed put, getting herself comfortable and buzzing at me, demanding affection. I also began to notice a smell in my room, not unlike the cloud of body odor wafting around Bonnaroo this time of year, but a little sweeter, and probably more beneficial to our society. After determining that the smell wasn't from my armpit or my dirty laundry, I started to ponder the bunny connection. The smell was wild and strange and mildly intoxicating, kind of like in that gasoline/turpentine way. It was then that I gave my shirt the sniff test, where she'd been nestled all night, and the odor was all over it. Perplexed, I turned to my Savior, the omnipotent omnipresent omni-sexual Internet, for advice, and came across this:

It was then that I realized what I had suspected: My baby has become a little lady, and it was time to release her into the wild. I opened the door and let her run out onto the patio, where she was swiftly dispatched by a large hawk that had been ominously circling overhead. I exclaimed, "that's nature for you" and spent the rest of the evening in a leather wing-back chair, smoking a brier pipe and reading Darwin, content in my actions. and she was flirting with the "man of the house." I then set out to find the corniest version of a certain Neil Diamond song to play over and over for her (and me), and I think I found it:



I am not unfamiliar with female advances, but 96-percent of them come in the form of doe-eyed flirtations from overweight black women in the Duane Reade check-out line, where I'm patiently waiting to buy blueberry yogurt pretzels. It happens often. Back home in Atlanta, I'm the WASPy love interest for the cashiers at Kroger — and the sketchier the neighborhood the better. But this was my first inter-species flirtation, and it kinda stunk.

I started reading more. Too much, actually. I saw things I can't unsee. I read things I shouldn't have read. Nature is weird and so is the Internet and so are people, so the trifecta was intense.

not all trix are for kids

This was seriously on a rabbit owner discussion board in a spay/neuter thread. It is terrifying.

I was going to say that things have calmed down, but for the last 30 minutes she's been in my lap. Every time I reach forward to the keyboard, she nuzzles my wrist up over her head to be petted. I am still not the boss.

Besides finding the above pornographic cereal mascot, I've found lots of useful information. Apparently this behavior is a good indication that it is time for her to be spayed. I don't really want to spay her, but it is in her best interest in terms of health and longevity. Hopefully she'll stop flirting with me once the spaying is complete; besides, even though I love my now-grown-woman bunny, my heart belongs to someone else. FREE DELILAH!!! I'm waitin' for ya baby.

 

Wait For It

Some stuff about me:

• If you're a skateboarder over the age of 30 and you don't have a video game or a show on MTV, I'm judging you, and you've got a big hole to dig yourself out of for me to like you.  

 

• I want to start a website called etsy-wetsy.com. It will be the result of me and my rabbit going to craft fairs and peeing on kitchy, handmade items.

• If you're a girl walking into my bedroom and you see one side of the bed is piled with clothes, magazines, drawings, pamphlets, empty shopping bags and newspapers, I didn't expect you to be here.

• My life's Catch-22 is that I am good at everything but monotonous work, and monotonous work seems to be an essential part of the American Dream. Of course, this is what the American Dream looks like, so screw it:

redeemed by the cardiologist

• I am seriously considering getting an online personal assistant from India or Bangladesh or whatever's cheapest because I become paralyzed by the most mundane, simple, routine tasks. This includes mailing a letter and writing a check. Or "paying rent."

• I've said it before and I'll say it again: I really think it sucks that every time someone returns a pair of Tom's to the shoe store, they take a pair back from a needy child.

• That being said, what a dream job.

• I made this drawing. I call it "Jack Hannah-bal Lechter Goes To Australia." I probably need to color it in to show Jack's khaki shirt and koala blood.

• They say cell phones cause brain cancer, but I feel like I'm safe since I pretty much text only. But then I realized I'm walking around with a $90-per-month asbestos cannon sitting in my pocket just two inches from my scrotum.

• I overheard the following statement recently: "That's what sucks about autotune — it takes no talent."

• I recently saw the best license plate I've ever seen in person, and risked death to get this photo:

the search continues

• I think the term "runner's high" is nonsense, but I like to think of a "walker's high" as old people pushing their carts around stoned on pain meds.

• I think abstinence is stupid. Who wants to sit around hearing someone brag about being an experienced virgin?

• I not-so-secretly think it's okay to be pretentious (or at least educated) about almost everything — clothes, food, architecture, design, music, art, literature — but you should also understand that I wear my underwear and t-shirts until they literally disintegrate.

• In my two years in New York, I have witnessed some weird stuff: two people getting urinated upon by bums, two fat old people make out — like, seriously go after it — in a thunderstorm, getting drenched all the way down to the control briefs and massive bra, heard countless stories of masturbating hobos on the subway flashing their crusty weiners at girls I know, but nothing could have prepared me for watching a woman hike her skirt and diarrhea in the street in broad daylight. Actually, that isn't true. I was prepared — I had my camera phone ready:

you see, the socks are protecting the sandals from splashback

I think this is all I have for today. I've been sort of manic-depressive lately over the completion of tasks and looking toward the next one, and to completing one thing before moving on to the next. I need to believe that I am, indeed, doing what I should be, even when sometimes it's very stressful and seems to be leading nowhere. And sometimes I just need to relax, and not be some damn high strung.

My good friend sent a text yesterday (that likely blasted my balls chock-full of cell phone radiation) telling me I'd been slacking on this blog, which gave me a little motivation to write a few things down that have been stuck in my head. Sorry they're all crazy...