I haven’t been on craigslist since I settled into my apartment, happy to take a break from checking it constantly for housing, for a hand blender, for free stuff abandoned on the side of some road. Because of my craigslist hiatus, I’ve also not visited another section that I occasionally clicked through in the past: the missed connections. A lot–maybe most–of these electronic shots-in-the-dark are pretty absurd. The cringe-worthy, error-laden message seem to be more about a w finding the m at the gym who may or may not have been giving her bedroom eyes at the elliptical than about that w locating the m with whom she actually had a connection.
But there’s still something undeniably romantic about the prospect of finding someone with whom you did, in fact, connect, if only via a shared amused grin at the checkout line of Whole Foods. Maybe it’s just the crude, incredibly unromantic format of craigslist that really makes it all just seem a bit seedy. If so, that might be why I’m currently slightly smitten with Sophie Blackall’s Illustrated Missed Connections. These slightly Maira Kalman-esque renderings of selected missed connections change a few lines of awkward, uncomfortable text into something quite lovely and, dare I say, ridiculously hopeful.
(Thanks to my friend Emily, whose tmblr lead me to this link).
live in the layers 