strike that

gary indiana gary indiana gary indiana

Way back two weeks ago when La invited me to spend some time in Austin, right after I thought hooray, La! and hooray, Austin!, I thought, Oh shit. Two weeks. I really hope I don’t drive La and Marc crazy. Because (a) two weeks is a long time to encroach on other people’s lives, homes, and schedules, and (b) I’m just feeling a little squeamish about imposing, given recent events. Luckily La and Marc are superfabulous hosts, with long lists of things they don’t want me to miss, and a kitchen full of foods I like waiting for me when I arrived, and even a welcome t-shirt that says tortuga. It has a turtle on it.

But superfabulous hosts make me the most worried, because all that superfabulousness has got to be exhausting. So part of my game plan for not driving them crazy involves getting myself out of their way sometimes. The main obstacles to this being that I have neither a car nor a single other friend in Austin. And herein lies the magic that is Craigslist.

Some m4w was looking for company to an outdoor musical in the park tonight. He sounded cool and looked cute so I wrote up a clever little response. But in the ten minutes it took me to do this, his post disappeared. So I wrote my own post, explaining that I was all excited about the show and did anyone want to join me?

Have you ever posted to Craigslist? It is always amusing. In this particular case I got about 20 responses in the few hours the post was up. Some of them were illiterate or clearly unrelated to my request. Five of them sent pretty cute pictures but not much in the way of text. One of them was the guy who had written the original ad, saying wasn’t it funny that I had done this and we should talk anyway. One of them was the guy I would have gone with if he had written back earlier, whose whole response email was the subject: I’ll bring the ice cream and the message: you bring the blanket. Also he had a big smile.

And then there was M, who I decided to go with because he expressed what seemed like a genuine interest in seeing the show, and because when I Googled him I found something short he’d written that was pretty cool.

Turns out M used to work in theater. So although he was a little shy, and maybe a little nervous, we had a good time – at the musical in the park, and at the Christmas-light-adorned coffee shop afterwards with the band that sounded like a punk Tom Petty. And most of all in the car between these places, when he let me choose a musical from the lengthy selection on his playlists. There's really nothing like singing showtunes with a person you just met and will never see again.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:59 PM