100 page breakup letter

tonight on the walk home from canal street research i listened to lovesong by the cure on repeat. i love when the night is just cool enough that you can have a pleasant, long walk and when it's just late enough on the given day that you can find a route home that involves encountering minimal people. i have been very into the cure this week, and it's a little dissatisfying to listen to their recorded stuff because you just want the sound to match the emotion and you think about how incredible it would be to hear them live with the full richness of their instruments at high volume. a lot of the music i have been into this week are the kind that i want to listen to while lying in bed and staring at the ceiling: burial, the cure, lou. i am feeling anti-work today, i have spent too much non-work time with my coworkers over the past couple days and i am sick of most of them. at team dinner today, which we had only 3 hours after team lunch, i spent almost the entire dinner on my phone texting catherine, which i recognized to some extent was kind of rude but i was too engrossed in conversation to really care. i was sitting next to one of the coworkers i don't like as much and whenever i would look up from my phone to look at him to respond to a question he posed he would stare intensely at me for seconds on end without speaking and it was infuriating, like are you trying to induce infatuation through long eye contact or something? at another team meal one of my coworkers' elbows was occupying way too much space in my part of the table such that i had to lean back to avoid my face being closer to his than i wanted to while we talked, and it irritated me. in general i feel that i have been talking to too many men both platonically and sort of non-platonically and it's gotten overwhelming, i feel like i'm unable to gauge what's happening with any of these conversations and what each person wants from me such that i end up just having the hazy impression of "men want things from me" hovering over me all day. i deactivated my profile over the weekend and it was a relief to have that dimension removed, but now i feel that i'm mostly talking to men with whom i'm developing friendships or men that i've been hooking up with / arranging to meet and hook up with and it is stressing me out. it's always fun texting a newer friend or someone who's in the sweet spot of "definitely a friend" with whom you have "potentially good friend" vibes. i see the names pop up on my phone and get hit with that sweet sweet serotonin but i'm also confused what exactly i want from them or what they want from me.. if they all ended up being 100% platonic relationships i would maybe be a little disappointed but i don't want to date or hook up with any of them either, not even the person who is officially now both an ex-crush and an ex-loml. i feel like when i was making my first slew of new friends in the fall it was with people with whom i organically gelled (you know who you are <3) and maybe being in a relationship helped solidify some of the male friendships as being strictly platonic, but i don't feel quite as deep or natural of an internal affinity with these second-wave, new male friends. but a friend crush is a friend crush, and i'll take em where i can get em, even if in the back of my mind i know i want some sort of male-specific validation from them. just kidding that's toxic. at canal street research we watched "the fall of the i-hotel," a documentary film dir. by curtis choy about sf manilatown in the 70s and the international hotel's tenants' (most of whom were poor, elderly filipino immigrant men) fight to stay in the hotel when it was purchased by a private corporation who wanted to evict them and demolish the building to build a luxury high-rise. the film climaxed during an eviction blockade when alternative legal routes for the tenants buying back the building had been exhausted and police troops were now being deployed to evict the tenants. hundreds of people had shown up to defend the tenants and were forming a human barrier around the building, and there was a shot of the elderly men inside the hotel, dressed in hats and suits, prepared to exit the building if need be, lined up in a row against the wall. the vulnerability on their faces as they awaited their fates, i thought of people facing execution and the phrase "their eyes were watching god" and started crying. for the next five minutes we watched unfiltered police brutality as the cops swarmed on the blockade and beat everyone back and dragged the tenants' defenders from the doorway of the building, and the tenants were called on to emerge and they each walked outside, accompanied by organizers, friends, community members who were there to give them support and help them leave with some dignity. later during the conversation after the movie the moderator spoke about how many people regard that movie as being deeply depressing but how it should fill us with hope, something about how the strategies deployed during that organizing movement still echo in housing movements today and how it was simply a matter of the blockade not being strong enough to defeat state violence - some brecht quote about "things get defeated not because they are good, but because they are weak." i'm not sure how uplifting that perspective is for me personally but i texted vanessa to start looping me back into housing organizing stuff, determined to put myself and my time on the line again.