Missed Connections

Guys, I'm obsessed with Missed Connections on Craigslist.
And I'm not the only one. I keep meeting people, one here, one there, who all admit they read it every day.
I recently referred to it in a set as the Romantic's Lottery, which no one found very funny.
But a couple people did.
In Cleveland, for a minute, for a good six months, I got really into writing fake ones. But like, obviously fake ones. One to every hipster boy in the ABC on a Thursday night. Another one to all of my ex boyfriends at once. I usually got a lot of responses to those - boys who just wanted to say how funny they thought it was, others who obviously trolled the boards writing every single w4m ad trying to arrange apartment trysts in the time between their girlfriend leaving and their shift at Olive Garden.
In Cleveland, you always saw a lot of Missed Connections posted for pregnant women, there were a lot of pregnancy fetishes - or maybe men in Cleveland are just obsessed with fertility in the face of crushing economic depression.
Here in Wilmington, there's not as many, and most of them are for bartenders or college girls. Not a lot of people use craigslist. I've become a cheerleader for it, in the hopes of making it more active, I tell people about it constantly. It's 2004 again, and I'm still hoping someday all the regional craigslists will take off, as I wander wistfully through the NYC boards.
I've never had one posted about me, except maybe this one that I think was from my ex boyfriend, about how much he never wanted to see me again and how much my book sucked. I'm not positive it was him, but I read it and thought immediately it might be, which is how these things work. If it's not him, then somewhere out there is another girl writer whose ex also hates her, and that scenario massively appeals to me too, especially cause I want to know if her book really does suck.
Recently there was an ad posted on the m4w boards here with the title Bigfoot was a Republican, and was a "literary" ad, which basically just described his dream girl as a barefoot hippie with a lot of trash in her car who picks up hobos and reads a lot of Tom Robbins, and then threw his vision out into the universe, waiting to see what stuck to it.
I wrote him and told him I liked reading it. We emailed each other a few times. It died off, like these things do.
But the point is I am skidding on the line between just reading and actively participating.
The other day this very cute guy was at my friends house, and mentioned he read them all the time too. he has a girlfriend, but if he didn't, it would be incredibly tempting to write him a real one. Except how does one even do that?
Yesterday a customer brought a professor from school in who I hadn't met, and introduced me, and he made a really good impression. Then I googled him, and found this hilarious local paper article about him, that made me like him even more. But the teachers are never searchable on facebook really, so I wrote him an email at his school address that was basically like " this made me laugh a lot, sorry this is creepy I googled you, if you want to talk to me here's my real email." And I keep feeling like I've done something untoward, even though I don't think I have really? He's my age. We're adults. But before I actually wrote the email, I actually thought about writing him a Missed Connection, just to see if he was the type.
Because there's something nice and a little crazy in a comforting way about someone who reads them, to me anyway.

But they are so crass mostly. It reminds me of the people who pick up civet cat poop to find the coffee beans. Just digging in shit for some caffeine.