Rachel’s Team Pick:
There are some really great things on the internet and some really terrible things. Oftentimes, one of the nicer things is Craigslists’ Missed Connections. They’re not perfect; it’s hard to feel really inspired or reassured about the state of the world by “you were smiley and shoe shopping. want to hook up?” (That one is real!) But there are some gems, and there are some things that aren’t gems necessarily but are sweet and earnest and are a nice reminder that sometimes humans notice other humans in a nice way, in a way that says “I wish I knew more about you, girl with the broken strap on her messenger bag, but I didn’t want to bother you, so I’m writing about it instead, very unobtrusively.” It’s how you know that someone, somewhere, maybe really does notice your new haircut and your pretty smile and your sweet-ass sneakers.
But they can be very ephemeral, these missed connections! They age out and disappear, and the fact that someone going to see a Pink Floyd cover band noticed a cute girl looking sad and smoking a cigarette outside a Chipotle and wished they could ask her what was going on is gone forever. Until now, when an enterprising and admirable person named Sophie Blackall decided to put at least some of them into a book, with BEAUTIFUL illustrations.
There are some romances — Cleopatra and Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Bette and Tina — that are momentous enough to be immortalized throughout the ages in art and collective memory. For each of those there are thousands more that never actually come to pass. But there’s something kind of beautiful about those, too. Isn’t it time someone immortalized them?
Blackall’s book is ridiculously cheap on Amazon right now — I seriously feel like you would regret missing this one.
There are some romances — Cleopatra and Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Bette and Tina — that are momentous enough to be immortalized throughout the ages in art and collective memory.
THIS.
Local free commuter paper, MX, has one of those sections. My friend was in it on the ONE DAY she picked up the paper. She abstained from making the connection, but did tell everyone she was already connected with that it was her.
This has lived in my bookmark bar for I don’t know how long now, and I click on it when I need cheering up. She’s also working on http://drawnfrommyfathersadventures.blogspot.com/, which is very worth a look.
Another lovely Missed Connections “translation” – http://missedconnectioncomics.blogspot.com/
Every time I hear anything about missed connections, I immediately think to my days working in a public library. We, younger library workers, often found ourselves subject to being missed connections (Dear tall librarian with the sad eyes, you checked out a paperback pulp fiction to me this afternoon. I was the balding, middle aged man with the red baseball jersey. Perhaps I could make you smile again?)
That being said, this looks to be a lovely collection. ;)
“I wish I knew more about you, girl with the broken strap on her messenger bag, but I didn’t want to bother you, so I’m writing about it instead, very unobtrusively.”
As someone who constantly wears a messenger bag with a broken strap, this weirds me out a bit… But I’m going to assume you just made this up randomly and that this is not an actual missed connection and that it’s probably not about me anyway (though now I’m in this odd state of wondering)…
nope, no need to be creeped out! it was totally made up/more a reference to my own frequently falling-apart bag than anything else. there is a strong and vibrant community of girls with broken messenger bags, so you can take comfort in that.