an homage

Craigslist has become one of my favorite sites since I started apartment hunting a few weeks ago. So many great things about it! Looking at the insides of people's homes without knowing them and clicking through the list of free things offered. It's crazy ..ranging from a free pile of bricks to a free pasta meal in a to-go box, even a free (obviously well-used) Spanish-English dictionary. It really makes me think about all the different types of people in the world...people who would post these kinds of things. Or the huge polarity between the asking prices of a couch that pretty much looks the same and the people behind those decisions.

What I love about Craigslist is its unusual quality of unpretentiousness....where everywhere else in social media and the virtual world, people are putting on their best faces. The Internet is all about letting you get things just right, where you're the manipulator of your own image, your profile picture, tagging and untagging, saying the right thing at the right time. What you don't say (or forget to say) is sometimes even more telling. It's like we're constantly in a place where we keep on constructing a virtual identity that, on the one hand, frees us to say or do things we wouldn't necessarily otherwise, but which I feel, on the other hand, is a big weight that sits on us, another thing that's limiting just by its existence.

Craigslist has this loose, "I don't care" attitude that I really like. It's pretty real for someone to say, "My couch is broken, clawed by cats, missing a leg, or has an ugly floral pattern from the 70s, but hey! It's cheap and all my friends slept on it," and there's someone equally real who will pay $50 bucks for it. Or someone like me...who keeps holding out for a slightly better version than that.

There's also this undercurrent of the rags-to-riches story in the background, trash to treasure. A little fairytale that gives things a natural glow. And because most of the selling ads are from people who are moving, there's another sense of release, getting on with it, being freed from your things. It seems to be human nature to be tied down, to our identities, belongings, whatever we insist on carrying with us. Some sort of security with being attached at the hip to something - at least having it within our reach. Craigslist makes those things a little more immediate and isn't fake about it.