Missed connections

by RAF KATIGBAK

Nothing is as endearing as learning about someone’s guilty pleasures. Maybe it’s because you’re getting a window into a darker side of their mind, a side they keep hidden away from most of the world. Or perhaps it’s comforting to know that nobody is perfect. Or maybe it’s nice to know that people are more complicated than we might think. Either way, to find out that your staunchly feminist friend is a closet Shakira fan, or that an intellectual avant-garde music producer you know spent an entire afternoon watching 50 Cent videos on YouTube, or that one of Montreal’s top chef’s favourite breakfast spot is the Zellers café at Alexis Nihon Plaza, is actually pretty awesome.

Maybe I think it’s awesome because I don’t have any guilty pleasures. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that my taste is so impeccable, but rather I like so much bad stuff that the sheer guilt would force me into permanent seclusion from the rest of mankind. So rather than spend most of my life holed up in a concrete bunker in Antarctica belting out ’90s boy band karaoke (Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” rules), memorizing Steven Seagal’s Above The Law line for line and filling a giant salad bowl with Spicy Doritos and freshly-popped Jiffy Pop layered consecutively so that the heat of the popcorn melts the Jalapeno nacho dust crystals ever so perfectly—a friend’s invention I have aptly dubbed “Supersnack”—I’ve ceased to give a shit who knows what crap I like. Lord knows I’ve confessed a lot of pretty embarrassing stuff to you, dear readers.

And here I go again: I just discovered Craigslist’s Missed Connections section and every time I read it, it’s like God drinking liquid crack and then peeing into my eyes.

Ho-lee-shit. There is something completely addictive/hilarious/morbidly fascinating/eternally heartbreaking yet hopeful about the posts that browsing through takes me through a greater range of emotions than when I did whippets and watched Wall•E.

When I first started reading it, I was slightly grossed out and slightly ashamed. I imagined that if I confessed to anyone the fact that I refresh the page every 35 seconds, they would quite rightly look at me in disgust, throw up and run screaming into the night. But I discovered that, more often than not, whenever I would quietly let slip about my obsession, the person I was talking to would just look around quickly, lean over and whisper in my ear, “Me too.”

My friend S.—who has used it twice to apologize to strangers for “various misbehaviour on separate occasions”—likes the more ridiculously raunchy posts, like the gentleman giving kudos to “girl giving blow jobs in cars every night in front of the Place du Boulevard building downtown.” My other friend M. likes the formulaic approach of the traditional missed connection posts, where the beauty lies in the of subtle differences that reveal our humanity, kinda like haikus but with more public transport references. My friend D. likes the ones that talk about relationships in an overtly generalized way, waxing poetic about lost love or unrequited advances.

“They’re obviously not meant to be read by the concerned party,” she told me, “but maybe someone will think it might be them and make the step they were always afraid to.” Other romantic types are interested in what MC might mean as a whole: “Missed connections is about the feeling that anything is possible,” someone told me, “that possible lovers are just around the corner, lurking at all fucking times. You think you’re not being noticed but someone is actually falling in love with you.”

Personally I like the hilariously gnarly ones that contain the sentence “I didn’t want to seem creepy…” and then invariably end with something super creepy like “…but I was really hoping you’d stop the elevator and you’d make a foot-pussy for me”.

It’s obvious why people check it. It’s a milder form of narcissurfing where you’re not straight-up Googling yourself, but more like checking party photos to see if you’re in them. One day perhaps you’ll see an exact description of yourself in a post along with the exact description of that person you had your eye on in that café/restaurant/northbound 80 bus.

But why do people use it? Maybe it’s because, as S. put it, “they feel alienated in the city, and that the missed connections give them an outlet to try and tap into a more intimate type of communication than is normally shared between strangers in the confines of a cold, busy society.”

Or maybe it’s much simpler than that. Maybe it’s just an easy way for one human being to share their thoughts and feelings, to say simply and plainly without inhibition or guilt, “Hey you, I like you. How about a foot-pussy?”

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA