TKOG Who writes the most absurdly specific personals ad in history

NTKOG #123: The kind of  destiny-flouting control freak who, not content to simply cast her romantic fate to the winds, sets about constructing it an elaborate friggin’ parachute. On Craigslist.

I am: drawn to maybe one in five hundred men I meet. In turn, only perhaps one in five hundred of those men is drawn to me. My situation is tenuous.

I am not: giving up. I may not be like other people — in some ways that are important, and some ways that are not — but what can I do? Just die alone?

The Scene: Craigslist, that favorite hidey-hole of the skeezy, the irrepressibly insane, and — occasionally, one hopes — normal, great people who just occasionally … wonder. For the first time in my life on Sunday, I skimmed the personals section and, because I am TKOG who would usually consider it beneath her, decided to test my assumptions. That’s what this is all about, right?

But as I read through both the M4W and W4M sections, a disquieting realization: men described all the qualities they wanted in a woman; women described all the qualities they possessed. But nowhere did anyone make any demands on men. That’s not right! I’m a woman! I have demands, goddamnit! Hence my quest to write the most absurdly specific personals ad ever…

Must be brilliant, must be weird, must be wonderful. – 23 (Brighton)

You are: very, very, very smart. Do not trifle with me about this. I don’t mean smart compared to your dumbass friends – you are smart compared to the general populace. And you’re kind of a jerk about it sometimes, but that’s okay, because I like you a little better for that. You’ve got a four-year undergraduate degree from an elite or at least top-tier institution; maybe you’re in grad school, maybe you’ve just considered it. If I catch you off-guard you will admit, non-ironically, that there is something about tweed…

You read for pleasure, during your commute and before bed, although not, you’ll admit, as often as you’d like. You hang out in bookstores sometimes, and not just to pick up girls. You will recommend books to me, immediately and fervently, and I will quickly come to respect your judgment. You will learn interwar British slang after meeting me, and begin using it inappropriately much; your friends will question the additions to your vocabulary and you will be self-conscious at first, then realize, screw ‘em, words make life taste better.

You know interesting things about science and philosophy, and will teach them to me in small nibbles. I might ask stupid questions or I might ask brilliant ones, depending on so many factors.

You make jokes about US Presidents, Paris Hilton’s latest hair extensions, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, factor trees, programming languages, quirks of Latin noun declensions, your pedophile ex-dentist, the social contract. Every time I get off the phone with Wells Fargo, I sigh to you, “Just call me Andrew Jackson, ‘cause I’m at war with the banks,” and you smile at me regardless of how many times you’ve heard the joke, and it’s okay because you always make that same Anne Frank pun and those are just things about who we are that we will find at first endearing, then annoying, and eventually endearing again.

You do not play World of Warcraft.

One night we are lying down, not talking, then inexplicably start singing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song together. Afterwards, more silence. Isn’t it funny, the trivial ties that bind two people?

You are an old-fashioned gentleman, in that you don’t mention your psychological diagnoses or your life-saving relationship with your psychiatrist until several months in, when I already care for you too deeply to extricate myself because of the knowledge. We all have baggage. If you have hidden yours successfully for this long, then I commend and respect you. You drink too much sometimes, but this is not psychological. This is merely because sometimes the world is a shit place and you nurse the secret hope that if you drink just the right amount, somehow you will find yourself in a Fitzgerald novel. Of this, I also approve.

You are mid-30s or younger. You are taller than me, and big-framed. If you are not spectacularly attractive, you have the look of someone who once was. Maybe you smoke. Maybe you are a former drug addict. Almost definitely, once or twice, you have thought about swallowing bottle after bottle of cough medicine to make yourself temporarily dumber to see if you can whittle yourself into a form that fits this world better. If you tried it, it did not work. If you haven’t tried it, then don’t, please.

You are otherwise a happy, successful, passionate person with many friends and interests. But there is a voice within you that whispers: “were a woman possible as I am possible…”

The Verdict: After my failed Craigslist Missed Connection posting, I assumed this one would be a misanthropy-feeding wash, receiving at most two responses. I was completely wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I’ll save the rest of the story (and some amazing email excerpts) for tomorrow…

Oh heck yes, guys. TO BE CONTINUED. Also, I’m totally going to count tomorrow’s as a separate NTKOG, because, dude, I’ve got a deadline here. So you can start drafting your letters of complaint.

Tagged as: craigslist, feel free to forward this to hugh laurie in case he wants to get divorced and marry me instead, i really do make that andrew jackson joke all the time (it is only one small drop in my jokes-about-jackson bucket), in which i am unabashedly elitist (but you forgive me because you love me), no offense to any readers who regularly answer craigslist personals, personals ad, sketchy, the quote in the end is from the gregory corso poem "marriage" which you should totally read