The next guy’s response must be eight thick paragraphs and I should love the length of this diversion, but I find myself reading only half of each sentence. He’s younger than I am, which loses my interest right away, and he’s almost done with college, finishing his last physical therapy classes and already interning at a clinic, already knows where he’s going to work, “likes to keep it laid back” and probably wants to meet me at an Outback Steakhouse and — ick, that’s enough. I hit “next,” almost pissed to have even read that far.
And then — ahhh — the one I’m waiting for, the one I knew was out there, opens with “You know, it’s odd that the word ‘Indie’ drew me to your ad” and explains how he really doesn’t relate to that word or lots of second-rate famous Indie bands, but he says just using that word made me seem promising in the “cluster-fuck of featureless Craigslist ads”. I almost feel like I need to defend myself for using that word, but he’s exactly right about why I used it: to quickly summarize who I am. I guess that’s all it took to express who I “really am on the inside,” at least in this “cluster-fuck” setting.
He asks me what this job is that I love so much and again I immediately regret writing my ad with such haste. He says he feels “ensnared” by his job and wants to do nothing more than get back into working with functional design but that it’s so hard to get a job in this field. And I want to mention right back how — Yes! — I have hopes and plans and needs outside of this damned office job, how I want to do something with design, whether graphic or interior or clothing or editing a magazine where I put together all the photographs and interviews and features. But that must all sound so vague to spit out like that: nothing specific, just an unfocused yearning towards ART. But I’m just into what I’m into, and that could be a beautiful pattern for wall paper or for a dress or for an album cover. I can’t think how to really say this given that I have a degree I never think about in international relations. I’ll sound flakey, like some girl who’ll melt over any insincere dumbfuck who tells me I’m “special” and “really do have talent”.
So I simply write, “actually, i’m not at all happy with my job. i just didn’t want to sound spoiled like so many other twenty-somethings ‘doing the day job thing’ as if they shrug off the very idea of earning a living. but i’m also dying to do something creative for a living. i just don’t have the rich parents to subsidize a low-paying job working my way up in some kind of vintage boutique.” (There, blame it on someone else.) “so, for now at least, i need my office job, too.”
I tell him how I want out of here so badly, how I’m almost at the point where I’d leave without another job lined up just so I could feel possibilities and force something to work out. And as I type this I feel somehow bonded to this guy, as though we’re about to get each other out of work and slip away from everything together, support each other, make everything privately wonderful together. Just as importantly, I type out the bands I’m into, already being sure he’s into the same ones from the few that he mentioned. And I hit “send,” inordinately pleased with what I’ve written and sure I’ll hear back from my new boyfriend in just a couple minutes.