A good friend of mine sent me this writing gig post from Craigslist in L.A. As if dating, online and off, weren’t hard and strange enough:

ghost writer

Very busy executive would like to hire a writer to send emails on his behalf on personal dating websites. And do a few enails back and forth to get the ball rolling..

This person needs to know how to write in a masculine, but romantic way and at the same time create a challenge for the reader of the email

I’m from the South and I live in New York, so I’m not sure how y’all work it out there in Los Angeles. On the one hand, it seems like this dude runs the risk of getting his ass found out as soon as he does some ill-advised Blackberry thumb-stumbling of his own. But on the other hand, I’m not sure that this guy’s target audience would be smart enough to notice or deep enough to care.

I’m wondering here - what’s the real goal? Is it to meet someone of quality? Or just get laid? What’s the backup plan when this guy gets found out? I mean, if the ghostwriter succeeds, then they’re able to do something that the poster himself cannot do. This just won’t last.

I’m curious, too: what kind of responses did he get? How does one land this job, and what’s the time commitment?

One thing’s for sure though: whoever takes this job and takes it seriously is a putz, big-time. It sucks needing work and it sucks needing money, but I’d imagine what really sucks is looking in the mirror and knowing that you’re Cyrano de Bergerac with a dick for a nose.

There’s a pretty cool piece of wheatpasted subway art on the Uptown-bound side of the A/C/E at 23rd street in Manhattan. The posters are pasted in what had been empty spaces for advertising — these knocked my shoes loose a little when I saw them on Saturday morning:

For Google/ machine-reading purposes, the posters are images of Marilyn Monroe looking particularly lost and dazed with bleary, Warhol-style makeup. The text of the poster reads:

Then it hit me. I’m not going to be famous. I won’t get to be a rock star. I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time.

You can see a closeup after the jump …

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