Dear Craig's List,
I appreciate the services your site provides the community and have spent some time pulling from your various resources. That said, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to return some things to me that I have lost as a result of using your site. If you could review the list below and get back to me, I would appreciate it very much.
1. The 50 dollars I paid the now-MIA Hill staffer who used you to sell me a "disabled" Papasan chair, promised over email to be in perfect condition. Despite much aesthetically-compromising duct tape, it persists in dropping my guests on their asses.
2. The near two hours I spent meticulously crafting email responses to the "guitar instructor" who became frighteningly antagonistic, calling my work no less than seven times after I cancelled our appointment once I found out his "studio" was located in the bedroom of his private apartment somewhere deep in residential Virginia.
3. The "face" I would have saved had I -forgetting entirely the small nature of my District of Columbia social world- not used Craigslist MCs as a forum for letting my exboyfriend know how pathetically attached I still was by writing weepy, heartlfelt yet apparently not so anonymous odes to our severed love.
4. The promotion that I missed at work, likely due to the hours spent crafting posts and CL-related emails (see two and three).
5. The security of opening my email without the fear of finding a message from Gizblaster37@aol.com, who liked a message I posted on RnR so much, he lets me know on a quotidian basis (despite the threat of a court summons) the myriad ways in which he might pleasure me if I would only "open up and let myself be discovered."
6. The hours (I estimate them to add up to about 200, give or take 10 or 15) spent dating the man my friends still sneeringly refer to as “the internet lover.” While he was adorable in many ways and started off promisingly enough, traditional means of dating are more than adequate for finding men who “would rather just keep having sex but keep things light.”
Now, to be fair, there is also something I would like to return to you. I invite you to please reclaim from me the knowledge that I have gained from reading DC's Rants and Raves and Missed Connection that so many men are:
A) Panty sniffers (!)
B) Disarmingly irate that some women ruin their visual landscape by not maintaining a prepubescent physique
C) In love with someone they have never spoken to who rides their bus.