Sunday, February 25, 2007

Urban Foibles: the Heartbreak Club

I really ought to have something more intelligent to say than this, after almost two months of saying anything at all. But one of the most fascinating things that happened in the life of the city in the past month is--no, not 48 Abell (who has the energy any more)--this.

The launching of kizmeet is an all-too-predictable step towards the coming of the great internet-reality interface, when everyone (and I mean every single cellphone-camera-using, facebook-whoring human being) gets to live out his/her own Truman Show.

This leaves the "missed connections" page of Craigslist kinda dejected looking: a place past its prime, the internet equivalent of that tired-looking Chinese restaurant with stern waitors and dead lobsters in the water tank. And appropriately enough, I found this post(paraphrased):

"W4M--I saw you at Wong's Buffet in Brampton. You were the guy in khaki pants and white sneakers eating alone in the corner. We shared a few laughs at the steam table waiting for the fried rice. I was with family & couldn't ask for your number."

Steam tables, formica countertop, bad chinese food, Chervolet in the windswept parking lot--if Brampton was the antebellum South then Bloor St. might as well be my own Mason-Dixie line. But reading it still felt kind of cute. What do you call this? The universality of experience? Awkward girl gazes longingly at the awkward guy, fried rice in hand--aww, the tantalizing tactility of the moment.

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