free stuff—or with haiku pricetag

My girlfriend and I suddenly realized that we were totally broke, yet have to fill our apartment with furniture. We've turned to the free section of craigslist, a mailing list called freecycle (nationwide, but with localized lists), and an MIT campus giveaway list (filled with hacker jargon that confuses us).

So far, we haven't had to write a haiku to get stuff. But a NY math professor held a contest where the best haiku would get the empty cardboard boxes he posted on craiglist, the New Yorker reports.

The winning haiku:

Building has been sold
Fourteen years of things to pack
Leaves fall, hope must rise

It's not quite the same, but I usually put a little pity-mongering blurb in my emails when I'm trying to get free stuff, explaining that my girlfriend and I just moved here from far away (I'm from San Francisco, she's from England) and getting the stuff would help a lot.

This did help us out at least once. We went to pick up a dresser, and the woman said she decided Sarah and I must have it, since they were a couple like us: the woman was from San Francisco and her husband from England.

We got a kitchen table, dining table, coffee table, varied chairs, a sofabed, too, all last weekend.But we've hit a dry spell, and haven't been able to line up a futon. Maybe I should try unsolicited haikus.