Craig's list - what the warnings don't tell you

Decided to place a ride-share ad on Craig's list for my early-Thanksgiving-morning drive. It feels environmentally irresponsible to take a car over that distance with just one person, and the right company could make the trip more pleasant. Might also keep me from high-beaming cars who're for whatever reason blocking 4 lanes by puttering along shoulder-to-shoulder.

So I braved Craig's list. Which everyone knows is for meeting people who want you to consume their entrails on film. There's a ride-share section for people who want to drive somewhere together before or while engaging in illicit activities.

Checked e-mail just now, figured I might have a response.

Yep, one. Going to the same town where I'm headed, check.

A woman's name, check. Very Jewish name, check. With a telephone number, check. So I pick up the phone to see whether it's really a woman.

We chat. She has an annoying voice, and seems to have me on speaker phone.

As we're wrapping up, she says of course she'll split gas and tolls, and when I say it's more about principle for me, I'm not going to nickel and dime it, she asks why I'm doing this. I explain the environmental thing, then tell her about a lecture I heard this week. By an arch conservative America-likes-global-warming guy who says that the U.S. could realistically reduce harmful emissions by 20% in the next 3 years.

She's heard of him. Yeah, he went to her alma mater. Suddenly I realize I've heard her voice before.

She's got a very Jewish name, but in her e-mail she'd mentioned a relative's church event. We had this discussion 14 years ago. The messianic thing. I was making salad at the time, had a baseball cap on backwards.

I ask where she went to church when she lived in a city where I used to live.

Oh, she's 40, she's older than I am, we wouldn't have known each other. (?!) I ask again, she tells me. Of course, it's the same place Scruffy and I met.

So I say, yeah well I used to live in this one church-affiliated house. And she was a bodybuilder, right? And left the city when she got a job managing a hotel on the shore?

Fuh-reak. She was on staff with the Christianaziganization that took over the house where I lived in non-frozen-grinning peace during college. The transition period was not pretty; I fled to France. Suddenly she will not shut up about the religious stuff. She's inviting me to a Bible study in the middle of Thanksgiving day. I tell her I'm going there to see my great aunt. I don't tell her I'm no longer a Christian.


Un-check un-check un-check un-check un-check un-check.

Now I have to find a way to back out of taking her for the ride.

Anyone who's been to Disney will know what earworm will gnaw through my brain as I fall asleep now.