Opinion
It’s my new goal in life to get the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” changed to “curiosity burned my eyes.”
A couple weeks ago, a guest speaker attended one of my classes. The speaker talked to the class about a published article that resulted in tragedy. It all started with the desire to find something out of the ordinary, which lead the writer to a particular listing on Craigslist.
In retrospect, I completely missed the point of the talk and left class inspired to find a potential story by typing “USFSP” on Craigslist. I didn’t get a lot of results until I found the personals section. I was not prepared for what I saw.
There were three listings. The first was rather uninteresting in the context of this story. The second was an odd listing from someone requesting platonic flirting. That’s when things started to get interesting. The last was the most jaw dropping. It was a quite explicit request for a “casual encounter” in the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library. So vulgar, we can’t even quote it in the paper without offending majority of our readers.
I was baffled at first. Is this real life? Did someone actually respond to this? Could this encounter have happened in a room I’ve studied in? Just like that, I was out of material to read, so I decided to broaden my search. I typed in “USF St. Pete.” There were more results, all the more baffling. I had to share this find with the only two people that would understand why I looked this up in the first place. I’ll apologize for that now.
At the time, I thought this was the funniest thing. People I know could be posting these listings, and there were a lot of truly shocking requests. I then had the option to go even deeper, so I typed in “USF.” I don’t recall what happened next. I only remember it stopped being funny to me after that point.
This whole thing got me to think about human nature. I listened to a story that ended badly for someone after a Craigslist search was conducted. My first instinct after hearing the story was to do the exact same thing.
I’ll use a lighter example. I used to keep a broken cologne bottle in my room because I still used the cologne from time to time. One day, a friend visited me, and the bottle caught her attention. I told her not to pick it up, so of course she picked it up faster, and it leaked on her.
That’s human nature. Tell someone not to do something, and they’ll want to do it more. See this as an opportunity to break the cycle. Do not type in “USFSP,” “USF St. Pete” or “USF” on Craigslist under personals. Seriously, don’t do it.
